3 days ago
Jonas Vingegaard has lost belief he can beat Tadej Pogacar
Hindsight allows us to see with greater clarity. As a contest, the Tour de France ended on the day it was meant to begin. That was the first truly mountainous race to Hautacam, the 12th of 21 stages. It was the moment Tadej Pogacar chose to remind his adversaries they were wasting their time. He will clinch his fourth Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées at tea-time on Sunday but the outcome was known for ten days.
Pogacar is the greatest rider of this generation and there are good reasons for considering him the best of all time. When he races, things happen. He has, after all, won 21 stages of the Tour de France and yet the victory at Hautacam ten days ago was still exceptional. For months this was the stage he had targeted, believing it would give him the Yellow Jersey and with the help of his team, they would keep it.
Unexpected things happen in the Tour and the day before Hautacam Pogacar crashed close to the finish in Toulouse. It was a high-speed fall where for a frightening second, it seemed his head was about to collide with a 9in roadside kerb. Luckily he instinctively got his head up and just missed the kerb. Still it was a heavy fall and he felt beaten up.
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That was purely physical. 'Tadej is mentally very strong,' UAE doctor Adrian Rotunno said at the Base Camp Lodge Hotel in Albertville on Friday night. 'We were worried about the impact of that fall. He wasn't.'
Hautacam is a 13.5-kilometre climb at an average gradient of 7.8 per cent. This puts it up there with the toughest ascents. They had barely hit Hautacam when Pogacar got team-mates Tim Wellens and Jhonatan Narváez to increase the tempo. They knew the plan because both — Narváez especially — went so fast it seemed they had lost their minds.
Only Pogacar and his forever rival, Jonas Vingegaard, could follow Narváez's infernal pace. Of course he could not keep it up for long and when he pulled to one side, Pogacar went even faster. Vingegaard tried to stay with him and for a kilometre or so, he stayed at ten and 12 seconds back.
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The problem for any rider chasing Pogacar is that if the Slovenian wants to gain time, he does not let up. Takes a short breather and he goes again. He extends his lead, another breather and goes again. No relenting until he has crossed the line and there is no more time to be taken. At Hautacam he arrived 2min 10sec before Vingegaard, the first time in their five-year rivalry that he had taken more than two minutes on the Dane in a stage of the Tour. That gave him an overall lead of 3:31. He tagged on another 36 seconds in the next day's mountain time trial and then, truly, the race was over. This is not a bike rider who loses a lead of four minutes in the Tour.
Something else died on Hautacam; namely, the intense rivalry between Pogacar and Vingegaard.
Again with the benefit of hindsight we could argue this had happened at the previous month's Critérium du Dauphiné. On three mountain stages Pogacar toyed with his rival. And if there were any doubts about his superiority after the Critérium, they were banished on Hautacam.
This led to a certain desperation about Visma-Lease a Bike's approach to the Tour. They set out to upset Pogacar, to do whatever they could to get under his skin.
Their difficulty was finding a way. Their leader Vingegaard rode aggressively from the start which was unusual because the hilly stages of the first week did not play to his strengths. It was clear though that Vingegaard was riding strongly, perhaps as well as he has ever done. But on the short, sharp hills into Boulogne, Rouen, Vire-Normandie and Mûr-de-Bretagne, he could not hurt Pogacar.
On every stage that Vingegaard finished alongside or just behind Pogacar, he was visibly pleased. That suggested he was content to just hang in there. His team sought to play with Pogacar's head. Their riders attacked not to break away but merely to provoke a reaction from him. He did react and when he realised what they were doing, he thought it ridiculous. Matteo Jorgenson got in his way at a feed zone on the seventh stage and that led to a little pushing match.
On Friday's stage to La Plagne, Vingegaard refused to work with Pogacar to rein in the breakaway Thymen Arensman and that infuriated Pogacar. He ended up letting Arensman take the stage because he was not going to tow Vingegaard up to the breakaway. He also squandered his own chance of winning that stage.
Visma wanted to get inside his head and they succeeded. At what cost to themselves? The operation was a success but the patient died.
From this Tour, we learned why Pogacar loves racing against Mathieu van der Poel and why he chooses to ride the one-day Classics: Flanders, Roubaix, Strade Bianche, Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. In these races, there is not the time or indeed the inclination to play what Pogacar sees as silly games.
Visma have some soul-searching to do. They started the Tour protesting total allegiance to Vingegaard only to start looking for stage victories as soon as they thought their man was not going to beat Pogacar. What is certain is that Vingegaard no longer believes he can beat his rival. In this year's Tour, he has performed better than when beating Pogacar in 2022 and 2023. Last year was dispiriting for him. This year was worse.
There were moments in the race when, sitting right behind Pogacar after he had attacked Vingegaard looked to check on those directly behind him. He is now as concerned by the riders creeping up on him as he is by one riding away from him. He knows that in a year's time, the German Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and the Scot Oscar Onley (Picnic PostNL) will believe they can challenge Pogacar.
Lipowitz and Onley battled for the third step on the podium and even though the German got there, Onley will not be discouraged. At 22, he is two years younger than his rival and he showed he belongs at this level. From a promising third place in last month's Tour de Suisse to fourth in the Tour de France with eight top-ten finishes is some leap.
The penultimate stage from Nantua to Pontarlier sent the peloton through the Jura, a 184-kilometre route that had four not overly severe climbs but the weather was horrible and the race difficult. An early break got a gap and they had the day to themselves. Jake Stewart, a British rider with Israel Premier Tech, was there and when the French rider Romain Grégoire and the Spaniard Iván Romeo crashed heavily 21 kilometres from the finish, Stewart found himself with just the Australian Kaden Groves and the Dutch rider Frank van den Broek at the front of the race.
Hope did not last long as 16 kilometres from Portarlier, Groves attacked out of the group of three and went steadily clear all the way to the finish. It was a fine performance from the Alpecin-Deceuninck rider. Stewart finished sixth on the stage, his best result so far and now he will finish his first Tour de France.
On his way to a fourth Tour victory, Pogacar was asked how this one compared to the others: 'Every year we say, 'This is the hardest Tour ever, the hardest I've ever done' but honestly, this year's Tour was something on another level,' he said.
'I think there was one day where we went a bit easier. Even today, we were almost all out from start to finish. Even though it was the hardest Tour, one of the toughest races I've ever done, I enjoyed it because I had good shape and good legs. But I am really looking forward to the last day in Paris.'
Pogacar plans to take Monday off but says he will be back on his bike on Tuesday.
There was some joy for Visma-Lease a Bike on Saturday as their veteran Dutch rider Marianne Vos won the opening stage of the Tour de France Femmes with a brilliant late attack.
The 38-year-old overtook her team-mate Pauline Ferrand-Prévot approaching the line in Plumelec, and then held off Mauritian rider Kim Le Court in the closing metres of a gruelling uphill finish. Ferrand-Prévot looked set to win the 78.8km stage, but the Frenchwoman attacked too early and could not withstand the late surge from Vos.
