In pitching this Tour de France, “suspense until the end” was a repeated refrain from the race director, Christian Prudhomme, who insisted: “Until the last mountain stage, anything is possible.”
One week in, we have a gap of nearly three minutes between first and second place, and a yellow jersey that will remain on the shoulders of Tadej Pogačar for the next two weeks unless something utterly extraordinary happens.
The organisers opted to cram the major high-mountain stages at the back of the race, with the Alps taking centre stage and a double-header atop Alpe d’Huez to decide it at the last.
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As for the Pyrenees, the Grand Départ in Barcelona effectively made this happen. With the Spanish city situated just the other side of France’s other premier mountain range, an early visit to thin air was always on the cards, and it had to be lighter than usual given this early point in the race.
The Tour de France will never bypass the Pyrenees entirely. There’s no specific agreement for this; it’s just tradition. The Pyrenees are encoded in the DNA of the race, and treated with the Alps like tricky siblings who must not be able to detect any hint of favouritism.
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So that’s why, even only six stages in, we had a ‘proper’ Pyrenees stage, with two big names in the Col d’Aspin and the Col du Tourmalet – the latter the most-visited mountain in Tour de France history.
Where the organisers might just have miscalculated, however, is what came after the summit of the Tourmalet. There was 40km to the finish in Gavarnie-Gèdre, with a 20km descent followed by a gentle 20km climb to the finish.
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This was designed to make things easier, or at least to dissuade any intent to blow the race apart. The subtext was clear; ‘You’re going over the Aspin and the Tourmalet, but there’s a a hell of a long way to the finish, including a draggy 20km where no right-minded individual would want to be riding on their own in the wind.’
But they didn’t account for the fact that Tadej Pogačar is no right-minded individual. In fact, this was the perfect scenario for the four-time winner to inflict maximum damage.
Pogačar went on a rampage on the Tourmalet (Image credit: Getty Images)
Look at the time gaps. At the summit of the Tourmalet, Pogacar had half a minute in hand over Jonas Vingegaard. By the finish, he had 2:38.
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40 seconds was made on the descent, and another 1:28 was added on that long drag towards the line, to reach race-burying total of 2:38. And here’s another four bonus seconds for your troubles, Tadej.
Vingegaard himself spoke of how the descent and the valley drag didn’t suit him, and while this shouldn’t be an excuse, he was right. Pogačar, as we’ve seen before, is the superior descender. And he’s also the far stronger soloist on gradients that don’t constitute a proper climb – Pogačar has long-range soloed his way around enough Classics to know that.
Ironically, a summit finish might have been the better choice for the race organisers. It may have seemed like the riskier strategy on paper, announcing a GC showdown in bright lights, but it would have reduced the amount of terrain on which Pogačar had the advantage over Vingegaard.
The Dane was already decisively dropped on the upper reaches of the Tourmalet and would surely still have come off second best, but a pure climbing battle would likely have produced a smaller gap between the pair than adding in the descent and the drag – elements designed to ward off aggression but which only enhanced it.
Pogačar exploited this beautifully. His team set an infernal pace on the Tourmalet, and although Vingegaard didn’t even follow before Isaac del Toro had finished his turn, he knew he’d draw his rival out into a lone chase – with Vingegaard’s key lieutenants all-but out of the picture, and the rest of the GC groups scattered (at least initially) behind. In the end, the toiling Vingegaard only finished less than 20 seconds in front of that next GC group after nearly an hour in no-man’s land.
ASO route designer Thierry Gouvenou has since admitted that when they concocted stage 6, such big time gaps were not in their forecast.
“We were a little unsure about how difficult stage 6 would be, because we knew perfectly well that the Tourmalet would be a decisive moment,” he told TV 2 Sport. “To be honest, we had not expected such a large gap, and we thought the differences at the finish would be much smaller.”
But the organisers should have seen this coming.
After all, it was only two years ago that we had a very similar scenario in the Tour de France. The Grand Départ in Florence meant a very early passage over the Alps, with the mighty Col du Galibier tackled on stage 4 ahead of a long and often-pedaling descent into Valloire.
Pogačar attacked close to the summit that day and opened up a gap of eight seconds on Vingegaard. By the finish, it was 37 seconds.
That surely gave him inspiration for Thursday’s stage, which had the added ingredient of that draggy final climb, where without teammates, and too proud to drop back to the next GC group, Vingegaard would surely bleed time. And so it proved.
“As far as the suspense is concerned, you could say it was a failure,” Gouvenou admitted. “But that is also part of cycling. That is simply what Pogačar is like. He is so strong that any route suits him.”
In short, in their efforts to tone down the Tourmalet stage, the organisers toned it up. And in their efforts to provide ‘suspense to the end’, they have seen their race effectively settled after six days.
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