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There’s still a week to go in the Overcooked Tadej Pogacar v Undercooked Jonas Vingegaard experiment. The sport’s meat thermometers are really struggling to see how the Dane could overhaul what still appears to be a growing deficit though.
Overcooked? Or underfed?
Stage 10 probably goes down as the most boring Tour de France stage I have ever seen: no breakaway, no attacking, no hills, no nothing. Stage 11, in contrast, was among the most dramatic I can remember.
Rarely has finishing pretty much exactly alongside someone felt so threatening.
The first hour was ferocious in terms of pace, as various riders competed to get into the day’s break, but it was only after 150km that we hit more interesting terrain.
The stage finished with a whole series of shorter climbs, which seemed to encourage far more ambitious and unpredictable racing than a single slab of hors categorie mountain.
Pretty much inevitably, it was Tadej Pogacar who made the significant attack. He did this on the day’s toughest climb with 30km and two further uphill stretches still to come.
Nobody could follow and by the foot of the subsequent descent, he had claimed a 35s lead over Jonas Vingegaard and Primoz Roglic with Remco Evenepoel just a little further adrift.
Clearly he was in a class of his own. It was therefore something of a surprise when Vingegaard began winching him back again…
There is something very humbling about launching your big move and feeling like it’s worked, only to have your glorious solo ride to the finish sullied by the dawning realisation that your biggest rival is not in fact beaten, but actually now riding significantly quicker than you.
Humbling probably isn’t even the word. I imagine Pogacar felt a little like John Connor when he realised that the frozen and shattered T1000 was able to reassemble itself in Terminator 2.
“This is… troubling,” he might have thought.
The two riders rode together to the finish. I wouldn’t say Vingegaard outsprinted his rival for the win exactly, but he certainly delivered a fast enough finish that Pogacar couldn’t get past him.
Technically, it was close – but the sense was of a reigning Tour champion who was on the up physically and who was very much looking forward to being on the up altitudinally next week.
Could anything else explain the fizzling-out of Pogacar’s killer move? He had seemed to want something from a neutral service car at one point, but didn’t take whatever was on offer. He was then very conspicuously still eating during the later podium ceremony. Maybe he simply didn’t eat enough.
You’d probably mark that explanation down as either ‘clutching at straws’ or ‘bullshit’ if it weren’t for what happened later in the week.
Rare
Biniam Girmay and Jasper Philipsen traded sprint victories on Stages 12 and 13. The first one brought a second crash in two days for Primoz Roglic (one self-inflicted, one not) which was enough to see him abandon.
After that, the race entered the Pyrenees and if Vingegaard had been licking his lips at the feast in store for him, he ended the weekend looking pretty cooked himself.
On Saturday, Pogacar and Vingegaard made as if to rehash their Stage 11 story when the former attacked on the final climb and the latter tried to pace himself back on. This time however, that second bit didn’t happen.
Pogacar got across to team-mate Adam Yates and after a brief recovery riding behind him, set off again. The gap to Vingegaard was 39s by the finish.
A summit finish is a summit finish, but Vingegaard said that harder stages might suit him better; the kinds of days where everyone’s on their last legs before they even hit that final climb.
Sunday met that description, but Pogacar appears to have such a colossal stockpile of legs this season, he didn’t at any point look like running out of them.
Vingegaard’s plan was the cycling equivalent of Route 1: team-mate Matteo Jorgenson would absolutely hammer it on the steep lower slopes of the Plateau de Beille and then he himself would hammer it to the finish. No subtlety, no attacking exactly – just pure, all-out hammering from bottom to top and hopefully Pogacar would find the pace unsustainable eventually.
It sounds a stupid plan, but to be fair to Vingegaard, this is basically how he beat Pogacar in the previous two Tours de France.
And what’s the alternative? Worth a go, innit?
It did not pan out. After Jorgenson fell away, Vingegaard pushed and pushed and never looked back, and also never at any point dropped Tadej Pogacar.
Then, with 5km to go, he did look back – betraying the fact that if anyone were hammered, it were he. Pogacar quickly made exactly that diagnosis and promptly headed off to the finish alone.
On this occasion the gap was over a minute, which leaves us here on the second rest day…
It’s not a very exciting general classification, it has to be said, carrying, as it does, very little scope for intrigue or upsets.
Will the Giro d’Italia and two weeks of riding faster than anyone else in France catch up with Pogacar? It’s still possible, but we haven’t seen any signs of it yet and even if it does, his advantage is considerable.
What’s next?
Well I wouldn’t want to be tired going into this final week, but after two weeks of Grand Tour racing, that’s what everyone will be to some extent or other.
Stage 16 (Tuesday) eases them in a bit. That should be a sprint day.
Stage 17 echoes the previous Wednesday in that there are several climbs in the final 30km. A lot will depend on how they decide to race this one.
Stage 18 is another that’s hilly rather than mountainous, but with the challenges more evenly spread throughout the stage.
Stages 19 and 20 are unequivocally in the mountains proper. Friday comprises a trio of 16-23km climbs. Saturday they’ll face a couple more in that bracket, plus two slightly shorter ones. Both days are pretty much just constant climbing and descending.
The race then finishes not with a sprint into Paris, but a time trial into Nice via the Col d’Eze – so over a mountain basically.
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The final recap will be with you early next week.
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