Can the ‘New Vingegaard’ Beat the Same Old Pogačar?

Irish delight

In the first real mountain stage of the Tour, with eight categorised climbs and more than 4,500 m of altitude gained, Yates was part of a breakaway initiated by Healy with 45.2 km to ride in the 165.3 km stage from Ennezat to Le Mont-Dore Puy de Sancy. This year’s Giro d’Italia winner took off on the final climb 2.4 km from the finish and fended off challenges by Ben O’Connor (Jayco AlUla) and Thymen Arensman (INEOS Grenadiers) to win his third-ever Tour stage and the 11th Grand Tour stage of his career.

Healy finished third, 31 seconds adrift but 4:30 in front of Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates–XRG), the former race leader, and goes into Tuesday’s rest day with a lead of 29 seconds over the Slovenian, with Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) in third, at 1:29, and Yates’s teammate Jonas Vingegaard sitting in fourth, 1:46 behind. On Monday, the traditional rest day in the Tour, France celebrated Bastille Day, so the country’s greatest sporting event could not be put on hold.

The new race leader, who also has a stage win in this Tour, was clearly delighted. “It’s a fairytale,” Healy said. “If you told me this before the Tour, I wouldn’t have believed you. To wear the yellow jersey is incredible, and beyond belief.”

But Healy won’t be part of the fight for the overall GC victory. Barring injury or illness, that will be between Pogačar and Vingegaard as it has been in every Tour of this decade. And this year, after 10 stages – that makes half of the race – it seems to be more of the same, despite Evenepoel’s best efforts to turn the contest into a ménage à trois.

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The “new” improved Vingegaard

But it isn’t more of the same, not as regards Vingegaard, at any rate, because he has shown an unexpected explosiveness and pace to rival that of Pogačar and has used these new superpowers to throw some doubt into those of us expecting another dominant Pogačar victory – and has perhaps even shaken the usually unshakeable Slovenian himself, though he has won two stages and Vingegaard has won none.

While Vingegaard has been smiling and waving at the camera whenever it sought him out, Pogačar has looked grim, has been questioning Visma’s tactics and called on them to “pay respect to everybody” after he appeared to get into a shoving contest with Visma’s Matteo Jorgenson in a feed zone on stage 7.

What the 28-year-old Dane has done, and which he hadn’t previously accomplished, is to catch Pogačar whenever he exploded out of a group on a climb and stick to his wheel. Those with memories of last year’s Tour or, more recently, last month’s Critérium du Dauphiné, will recall how easily Pogačar disposed of his rival on the climbs. One burst of speed and the race was over. That’s apparently history now.

Monday’s stage 10 was just another example. The stage saw a lot of attacks by Visma–Lease a Bike on Pogačar because his support team had been weakened. Pogačar’s main mountain domestique, the excellent João Almeida, dropped out of the race on Sunday after crashing hard with 6 km left to ride on Friday’s stage 7 and fracturing a rib. He gave it a go for almost two stages before realising he was in no shape to continue. In addition, another key UAE mountain support rider, Pavel Sivakov, appeared to be ailing during Monday’s stage and was not part of the action during the stage.

As a result of the injuries and the attacks, Pogačar found himself alone and surrounded by Visma riders as they started the climb to the finish line. Not only did he resist the repeated challenges from Matteo Jorgenson and Sepp Kuss, but he launched one of his signature explosive attacks on the climb, hoping to distance Vingegaard.

Confidence or hubris?

“They were a bit annoying with all the attacks, so I decided to make a better attack,” Pogačar said with a smile after the race. But for the fifth or sixth time on this Tour, the Dane stayed on his wheel, undaunted and confident. That’s the “new Vingegaard” – fast, explosive and apparently impossible to shake.

What Vingegaard hasn’t done is beat him to the finish line. But he has an explanation for that. “[Finishing] second, normally, I would say that I could be really happy with it,” Vingegaard told journalists after coming second to the Slovenian on stage 7. “But in my opinion, I made a few mistakes there in the sprint, and you never know if it would change anything. But anyway, when you made a small mistake, you would like to do it differently. I think if I had started my sprint just a second earlier, or two seconds earlier, then [I] could have surprised a bit, and it could have been closer at least. You never know.”

What he was saying, in the form of self-criticism, is that he is at least as fast, and perhaps faster, than Pogačar. Is that self-confidence or hubris (the overweening pride that made some men believe they were as strong as the Greek gods)? Time will tell if his new superpowers will survive what has so far been a super-difficult race and if they will still be there for the big mountains of week 3. But so far, though he trails Pogačar by 1:17 in the GC, Vingegaard remains confident. “I believe in myself, and I believe that we can make a difference in the second and third week,” he said.