When Jasper Philipsen was a child, long before he was winning Tour de France stages on a regular basis, he dreamed of becoming a professional footballer. Despite hailing from the same town as Belgian sprinting legend Tom Boonen, cycling neither interested him much nor ran in his family. But there was one trait evident back then on the football pitch that would continue to characterise Philipsen when he finally left behind ball sports to pursue a career on two wheels: his incessant drive to win.

‘When a football game didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I would be crying on the pitch,’ Philipsen says. ‘I had this winning mentality that’s not left me.’

That much is clear. At the 2024 Tour, when he was beaten to victory for a third time in the opening week, this time by Dylan Groenewegen on Stage 6 (after losing to Biniam Girmay on Stage 3 and Mark Cavendish on Stage 5), Philipsen slapped the bonnet of the race director’s car, stormed onto his Alpecin-Deceuninck team bus, let out an audible obscenity and then seemingly threw his helmet across the bus with a loud clatter that could be heard from outside. Jasper Disaster, as he has been referred to due to his apparent forgetfulness, was more like Raging Jasper.

‘I don’t like to lose – it’s who I am,’ he tells Cyclist in the weeks leading up to the 2025 Tour de France. ‘I’ll always be a bad loser because I work to win and I’m keen to win. Sometimes somebody is just better than you and you have to accept it, but it pushes you to work hard.’

This article was published by Cyclist in January 2025 You can read the full article here.