It’s the article that the entire Tour de France can’t stop talking about: Jonas Vingegaard’s wife, Trine Hansen, says the two-time Tour winner is “burning the candle at both ends”, and complaining that “so much travel” and a near-year-round schedule is “squeezing the lemon too much.”

The inference from Hansen was clear: if her 28-year-old husband continues in this vein, he will soon reach burnout and have a physical and mental collapse owing to too much workload. Speaking to the Danish newspaper Politiken, she added: “It starts in February and it’s back and forth every other week… It’s a really tough life. Jonas doesn’t recharge when he’s on another three-week altitude training camp with the team. He really needs to be with us at home in Denmark to do that.”

Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike team immediately attempted to shut down the story, insisting that there was no problem with their star rider’s schedule, while he himself played down his wife’s comments. Nevertheless, the interview, which took place a fortnight before the race, has sparked a debate that continues to reverberate around the Tour bubble: does Mrs Vingegaard have a point? Is the intense schedule of camp-race-camp-race-camp, with so little time at home, risking athlete welfare? In a nutshell: are modern day cyclists really close to burnout?

This article was published by Cycling Weekly during the 2025 Tour de France. You can read it in full here.