OK, *Now* I Think It's Over
More like Ouch-to-Hautacam
Like many of you, I’ve been enjoying Victor Campenaerts’ daily pre-stage Instagram posts from the Visma-Lease a Bike bus. If you’re not familiar with the gimmick, he has a quick chat with whoever’s around, and then he hands the mic to Matteo Jorgenson, who delivers a fact of the day about one of the towns featured in the upcoming stage. It seems like they’re having fun, in the Guys Being Dudes vein, and nobody loves Guys Being Dudes more than yours truly.1
And not for nothing, but Jorgenson and Campenaerts are both rocking mustaches. Perhaps their teammate, Jonas Vingegaard, with his Gobi Desert of an upper lip, could profit from their example.
He can shift to mustache-growing full-time, because I think we can say with some certainty that he’s not winning the Tour de France this year.
Here’s how I ended Monday’s special rest day post:
After Pogačar put Vingegaard on the canvas during the first time trial, I refrained from yanking on the tornado siren just yet. It’s a defeat for Vingegaard, I said, but not a decisive one. Not yet. Thursday’s stage is the earliest I’m willing to call it. If Vingegaard loses significant time on that stage, he’s probably racing for a podium spot, not the maillot jaune.
Hautacam,2 as I mentioned before the Tour, was the site of one of Vingegaard’s few decisive wins over Tadej Pogačar, back in 2022. This was a full-team master class by Jumbo-Visma; they softened Pogačar up on the Col d’Aubisque, then ratcheted the pace way up by dropping Sepp Kuss and Wout van Aert from the break and having them come back to pace as satellite riders. Wout’s performance on Stage 20 of the Giro will probably go down as his greatest satellite rider moment, but this one’s up there.
Visma-Lease a Bike went full afterburner all day, and I think that was the right decision. With Vingegaard already 1:17 down on GC, he needed to take big swings if he had any chance of winning the Tour. This is a mountain where he’d beaten Pogačar before, and Pogačar had hit the ground on Stage 11. Not a bad crash by any means, but you could see the defending champ wearing bandages on his left arm, and any contact with the pavement takes something from a rider.
More than that, it was hot out. And as much as I give Europeans shit for being giant babies about the heat, this was some legitimate chaleur; Pro Cycling Stats listed the average temperature at 30 degrees Celsius (or 86 degrees American), while the Peacock broadcast mentioned temperatures in the low 90s, with little or no shade throughout the day. Hautacam is a tough climb, but not super-high-altitude, topping out at just over 1,500 meters. That’s pretty tame compared to some of the monster mountains that are yet to come, but it sure as shit ain’t sea level.
Insofar as Pogačar has weaknesses, heat is one of them. Or, at least Vingegaard, with his rice paper complexion, repels heat better than his rival.
The iron, like everything else on that mountain, was hot.
Without the Col d’Aubisque3 as a ramp, Vingegaard’s team went buck wild on the first-category Col du Soulor (11.8 kilometers, 7.6 percent gradient). The climb started about 60 kilometers from the finish line, which with all that climbing made for about two hours of racing. And Visma-Lease a Bike just crushed the peloton. Halfway up the Col du Soulor the yellow jersey group was down to about 20 riders, maybe a third of whom were domestiques for the two favorites.
Remco Evenepoel got dropped almost immediately, followed by Ben Healy, the erstwhile race leader, who was never going to hang on to his yellow jersey for more than two stages.
Riders like Pogačar, Vingegaard and Evenepoel operate at such a high level, it’s hard to build a multi-minute time gap on one single climb. You need back-to-back climbs to peel off domestiques and other traffic from the lead group, and to wear down the elite GC specialists to the point where they might crack. Even if you can get that done on a single mountain, a decisive move in the final kilometer of a climb can only net so much time. Big gains are made when there’s plenty of real estate left to run up the score.
For a minute, I thought Visma-Lease a Bike had pushed too hard too soon, that they’d reduced the favorites’ group so quickly that the pace would leak out to nothing, and Evenepoel—having dropped but not cracked—would roll his way back into contact.
And that kind of happened. Jorgenson dropped but got pulled back into the leading group by Simon Yates, preserving Visma-Lease a Bike’s option for a two-pronged attack that might force UAE, or even Pogačar himself, to overexert himself.
But on the climb to Hautacam proper, the pace went back up, Jorgenson went out the back again, and with him Kuss, van Aert, Yates, Tiesj Benoot—the whole team. Suddenly, Vingegaard was alone on the mountain, and it was Pogačar who had the single teammate, Jhonathan Narvaez4 Adam Yates, who was capable of leading out an attack.
With just under 12 kilometers left on the climb, Pogačar struck. Vingegaard lost Pogačar’s wheel immediately, and unlike in previous shorter climbs, he wasn’t able to reel himself back into touch.
An attack like this in the final kilometer of a big climb might net only a few seconds; indeed, Vingegaard was able to limit his losses to 15 seconds or less for a couple minutes. But with so much runaway left before the summit, that rope gave out and left Vingegaard adrift. He lost two minutes and 10 seconds, plus an additional four seconds in bonuses, over 11.9 kilometers. It’s a miracle he didn’t lose twice that much.
This was the decisive attack of the Tour de France; Vingegaard now needs to make up three minutes and 31 seconds against a rider who’s beaten the brakes off him consistently for the past two years. That’s not going to happen in a straight fight.
And Visma-Lease a Bike lost its option to make it an unfair fight. The team’s other GC option, Jorgenson, had one of the worst afternoons out of any of the GC candidates; he shipped more than 10 minutes. On Monday, Pogačar ignored every attack from Benoot and Kuss and Simon Yates, knowing they were of no importance in the fight for the yellow jersey; now the same is true of Jorgenson as well.
In both of the two mountain stages so far, Visma-Lease a Bike has been all over the road tactically. From the jump, they’ve been overaggressive and chaotic. They’ve generally ridden like Vingegaard either 1) was much stronger than he is at the moment or 2) wasn’t there at all.
Nevertheless I can’t fault their tactics too much. They had to do something. Their attempt at to land a bolo punch on the Col du Soulor was based on a faulty premise: That Vingegaard is at least Pogačar’s equal in the mountains. It didn’t work, because he isn’t. But you know what? If Vingegaard can’t outclimb Pogačar, he’s not winning this race no matter what his team does. Better to die on your feet than on your knees.
Pogačar won this stage by two minutes and 10 seconds; Evenepoel, sure enough, paced himself to the line seventh, three minutes and 35 seconds after the stage winner. He got dropped something like 50 kilometers and three categorized climbs from the end, and lost less time to Vingegaard than Vingegaard lost to Pogačar.
Only eight riders crossed the line within seven minutes of Pogačar; only 13 got there within 10 minutes of Pogačar. This was an annihilation. It was spectacular enough that my usually non-cycling-focused Bluesky feed was talking about it, and enough of an outlier performance that the conversation turned to “is he doping?” before he’d even hit the summit.
Unless Pogačar crashes or gets sick, he’s going to win his fourth overall Tour de France title a week from Sunday. That’ll tie him with Chris Froome, one off the record of five, which is shared by four riders. Froome won four Tours, with two other podium finishes, and in all that time collected seven stage wins. Pogačar’s triumph at Hautacam was his 20th career stage win, tied for sixth-most all-time. If he gives even a little bit of a shit the rest of the way, Pogačar will finish this race in the top five for both career stage wins and days in the yellow jersey.
He’s 26 years old.
Another highlight of Instagram at the Tour de France: Ben Healy’s two stages in yellow have brought his dachshund, Olive, into 15 minutes of unexpected social media stardom. The dog debuted a new yellow leash on Thursday, and was dubbed “Chien Jaune” by the EF social team. Man, I love doing bits.
Which is French for “high cam”
French for “hill of at the lobster soup”
Apologies for losing track of my UAE domestiques
Mr. Baumann! As *relatively* new follower, I had guessed from your first Tour missive ("Tour de France Rest Day 1 Thoughts") that you kept to a no-spoilers policy in the subject lines. I'm a little bummed that my attempt at a media blackout was foiled, although this stage's viewing pleasure did not exactly spring from dramatic surprise endings.
Notwithstanding the above, thank you very much for all of your coverage. In the last year, I've been tapping back into my old cycling fandom (watched every Tour stage and many other races besides from 2003-2011, then went to college and basically let it go for a decade or more), and have appreciated your reporting (particularly in the classics season).