Two-time Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard will not race for the remainder of 2026 as he continues to recover from a collarbone fracture.
The Dane was second in the overall classification behind longtime rival and eventual champion Tadej Pogacar when he crashed on stage 15 of this year’s race and abandoned as a result.
His Visma-Lease a Bike team have now announced that he will end his season early in order to focus on recovery and training for next year, “to lay the foundations for another successful season”.
Vingegaard said in a statement: “After a long and intense racing period, a recovery period was planned after the Tour de France anyway. Due to the collarbone injury, the start of my training has been delayed and it is not possible for me to get back to top level in the coming period.
“The focus is on preparing optimally for the goals of the 2027 season. I will discuss these specific goals with the team in the coming period.”
The team added: “He is still experiencing the effects of the collarbone fracture he sustained in his crash in the Tour de France. As a result, it is not possible for him to work towards new racing goals for 2026 in the short term.”
Vingegaard enjoyed an excellent first half of the season, winning Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya - significant one-week stage races in the spring - in the build-up to a dominant victory at the Giro d’Italia.
Claiming the maglia rosa in Rome made him only the eighth male rider in history to complete the set of victories at all three Grand Tours, after he won the Vuelta a Espana in similarly assured fashion last year.
He resumed his rivalry with Pogacar at the Tour de France but was unable to keep pace with him in the first two weeks of the race, with Visma-Lease a Bike gambling on a win on stage 15 to try to get him back into contention, before he crashed on an innocuous-seeming corner on a descent before the final climb, the Plateau de Solaison.
The crash attracted wider attention as it occurred just hours after Vingegaard was subjected to a highly unusual 2am doping test. He refused to blame his crash on fatigue after disrupted sleep, but several other riders, including Pogacar and eventual second-place finisher Remco Evenepoel, criticised the decision to test him in the middle of the night.
Vingegaard had intended to skip his Vuelta title defence regardless of the injury, while the first half of the season was most important to him, with his primary goals the Giro and Tour de France.
The 29-year-old rarely competes at one-day races or major championships, with the main races of the autumn - the Vuelta aside - the World Championships in Montreal next month and the European Championships in Slovenia in October. He has never competed at a senior World Championships, only raced the European Championships for the first time last year and has not raced Il Lombardia, the final Monument of the season, since 2022.