“You never believe it until it happens,” he said in his post-stage press conference. “It was a very hard finish up here. To be honest, even just now I’m not thinking about much. It’s such a relief of many frustrating months and years coming down and I’m just happy.
“I had arterial endofibrosis diagnosis last year, which is like a tissue in the arteries and the hip region, which prevented the blood from flowing into my legs at high efforts. It’s not something that’s painful but it is something that comes when you go above the threshold and that’s why it was so hard to diagnose. It took a couple of years before we could diagnose what was happening. I had two surgeries and then it took a year to recover to be sitting here.
“For sure, it was very tough the last two or three years. Last year, we finally found the source of the problem and I had surgery. With a lot of motivation, I started this season hoping I would be right away back at my level, which absolutely didn’t happen. It just took a long time to recover, we believed at some points at the beginning of the year that I wasn’t going to make it back to that level.
“Since a couple of weeks, I am very grateful that I have faith in myself. I’m very happy that I have people that have faith in me. It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions but it’s nice to be at the top of the rollercoaster again.”
However, even riding the Tour didn’t come about easily. He tested positive for Covid ahead of the start in Copenhagen. Luckily, he was deemed not to be contagious.
“Just waiting for that result, you could see that I could start the race on Friday,” Jungels said. “It was very close, I believe, but it was OK. Luckily, I made it and luckily, I’m here. I know that I had no symptoms and I was completely healthy, but you never know if your neighbour, who you could infect, also has no problems. I think it’s not up to the riders and this is why we have experts and we have
doctors to make these kinds of decisions.”
Hopefully, that is the end to Jungels‘ troubles and he can focus fully on racing. Will he win another stage? What do you think?
