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For all his height, Matteo Jorgenson believes he is stunted when it comes to competing for Grand Tours.
The American, who is 6ft 3in (190cm), won the eight-stage Paris-Nice last month, raising questions of whether he could repeat the success over three weeks.
Speaking to Cycling Weekly, however, he explained he “hadn’t thought about” any Grand Tour ambitions, which he feels are “out of reach” for riders like him.
“I think, for a guy my size, it’d be a pretty big challenge to go for three weeks with so much energy demand,” the 24-year-old said. “That’s basically the biggest limiting factor. I just have a much bigger frame than most of these guys, and it’s really difficult to see how I would maintain that over three weeks.”
Doubts have been cast over Visma-Lease a Bike’s Grand Tour prospects this season, with three-time Vuelta a España winner Primož Roglič leaving to join Bora-Hansgrohe, and reigning Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard suffering multiple fractures at Itzulia Basque Country.
Sepp Kuss, last year’s Vuelta winner, is expected to receive more leadership opportunities this year, but Jorgenson does not see himself as a card to play.
“We haven’t seen a guy my size winning Grand Tours since maybe [Miguel] Induráin,” he said. “I think, nowadays, the energy demands are really so high that when you scale it from a guy like Jonas to a guy like me, I just need so much more energy to get over the mountain days.
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“One-week races I can get through pretty well. It’s when it’s chained together over three, four days between 3,000 and 4,000 metres [of climbing], I don’t think I could recover well enough. Obviously that’s just me theorising, I’ve never tried it.”
Stepping up
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Jorgenson has been one of the revelations of the season so far. After winning Paris-Nice, he was thrust into an early leadership role in the Classics – a side effect of Wout van Aert’s injuries – and claimed victory at Dwars door Vlaanderen.
Joining Visma-Lease a Bike, the American explained, has brought a marked step up to his career.
“It’s been unreal,” he said. “I just wasn’t aware of the scope of organisation here. There’s a bunch of jobs that I didn’t even know existed in a cycling team.”
“I was just having a meeting with the head of apparel, who’s a former rider, Paul Martens, and his only job is to be in charge of all the cycling clothing. He tries to meet with the riders and get all of our feedback to see if there are any issues and then make orders. It’s a job I never knew existed. But then once you have him, you realise it’s actually really important. You can make a big difference with the clothing.”
Last year, at Movistar, Jorgenson revealed he invested his own money into his performance, spending all of his salary from January until June on training and equipment.
“I was quite motivated to move to one of the best teams. That was really in my head as a goal,” he explained. “I thought of it as one year to go all in and just hold nothing back.
“It was difficult at times, mostly because I did a lot of it completely alone. Organising altitude camps on my own, hiring a soigneur, organising all the logistics for them, then cooking everything after doing really hard training, you get a lot of perspective on what is actually behind you, which you might not realise.
“If I came up in a team like I’m in right now, I would probably have no knowledge of what a team does or what goes on behind the scenes,” he added. “For me, [Visma-Lease a Bike] is the best environment I could be in. It makes me a lot happier, and it’s a lot easier to do my job.”
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