The 34-year-old Dane turns a long day in the break into a long-awaited victory at Tirreno-Adriatico.
Cor Vos
It took Michael Valgren (EF Education-EasyPost) the better part of a year to recover from a crash in 2022 that left him with a litany of painful injuries. It took him the better part of four years after the crash to get back to winning ways. On Friday’s stage 5 of Tirreno-Adriatico, the 34-year-old Dane finally climbed onto the top step of a podium for the first time since 2021 after a dogged performance from the breakaway.
“It’s unbelievable. We all worked so hard for this,” Valgren said afterward.
A younger Valgren was a star on the rise when he won both the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and the Amstel Gold Race back in 2018 with Astana. After a two-year stint with Dimension Data, he signed with EF, and he was coming off of a solid 2021 campaign that included a podium finish at the World Championships when disaster struck in April of 2022 at La Route d’Occitanie. Valgren hit the deck near the end of stage 4 and suffered a broken pelvis, a dislocated hip, and tears to his MCL, ACL, and meniscus.
The injuries kept him from making a Tour de France start on Danish roads at that year’s Copenhagen Grande Départ, and he only returned to racing in April of 2023. Since then, wins proved elusive, though he showed flashes here and there. As EF team boss Jonathan Vaughters told Escape Collective in a text, “he came pretty damned close in the Giro in 2024,” where he was narrowly bested by Benjamin Thomas on stage 5.
EF re-upped with him at the end of that year, but at Tirreno early on in the following season, he broke his collarbone.
Given that, it was hardly a surprise that 2025 would be yet another frustrating year for Valgren, who finished the season winless again. As Valgren said on Friday, however, he had a solid offseason training campaign. He was thus able to come into this year with some confidence.
“He’s a racer. He knows how to work for others. And he knows how to win,” Vaughters told Escape. “Just needed the right form and the right opportunity.”
That opportunity came on Friday at Tirreno-Adriatico. He jumped into the break in the early goings of stage 5 from Marotta to Mombaroccio, and he stayed there as one escapee after another lost touch on the up-and-down roads along the eastern coast of Italy.
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