The Chisel and the River
Tadej Pogačar decks Jonas Vingegaard, a guy with snacks gets arrested, and other thoughts from the second and final rest day of the Tour de France
“For the first time since Vingegaard’s crash at the Tour of the Basque Country, I’m of the opinion that Pogačar will not win the Tour de France.”
That’s how I ended Friday’s edition of the newsletter. I’m grateful to all of you who didn’t unsubscribe and ask for a refund after Sunday’s stage. Because, well, the opposite has come to pass.
Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard have dominated the Tour de France in the 2020s; each has won it twice, neither has ever finished lower than second.1 Their rivalry has defined the world’s most famous race ever since Primož Roglič’s crash in 2021 left the young Vingegaard in command of Jumbo-Visma’s title hopes.
And yet they’re extremely different riders. Vingegaard is the perfect grand tour GC rider; an excellent time trialist and high-altitude climber, all lungs and bones, perfect for this one specifically and highly demanding race discipline and borderline uncompetitive elsewhere. His calendar concerns the Tour to the exclusion of all other goals, except for one-week stage races to support his ambitions for yellow, plus the occasional appearance at the Vuelta for shits and gigs. This is Chris Froome, only shorter and with cheekbones instead of elbows.
Pogačar, I’m coming to realize, is not a GC rider at all. He’s a puncheur, with a fighting weight 15 pounds heavier than Vingegaard’s. He’s explosive, he’s aggressive, he can handle himself on rough terrain. Riders like this can get, like, 92 percent of the way to winning the Tour de France—Alejandro Valverde and Julian Alaphilippe both did—but they usually don’t have the time trial ability or high-altitude felicity to compete with the specialists. The extra muscle that makes it possible to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège turns into ballast after two and a half weeks and above 2,000 meters.
What makes Pogačar unique is that he can still win the Tour. He can rip off a time trial when it counts and he can force the action on long climbs. The only other puncheur in this century who could make that claim was Lance Armstrong, who, you might have heard, needed extra help to get there.
This contrast in strengths, otherwise extremely rare in grand tour racing, colors the rivalry. Styles make fights. Imagine both Pogačar and Vingegaard had to dismantle a large rock. Pogačar would go at it with a hammer and chisel. Vingegaard would place it on the bed of a fast-moving river. Acute force to break off small chunks versus gradual erosion leading to total obliteration.
This is what I said last week. Pogačar could gain 30 seconds at a time on his rival, but he’d have to make enough small cuts in order to be safe for week three, when the climbs are longer and higher. On that terrain, one bad day from Pogačar could gift several minutes to Vingegaard and swing the yellow jersey.
Pogačar can gain separation on Vinegaard whenever he wants to, with the caveat that Vingegaard can usually claw back the gap eventually. So Pogačar has to attack late and fast, so as to deny Vingegaard the opportunity to catch back up. On Stage 4, it worked. On Stage 11, it didn’t. Pogačar went off into the distance and was quickly reeled back in. If he didn’t have the juice to even put 20 or 30 seconds into Vingegaard, how could he withstand the three 2,000 meter climbs of Stage 19?
The figure I had in mind for a suitable buffer on the second rest day was three minutes. If Pogačar was up by three minutes or more, he was in good shape to retain yellow into the Nice time trial. Anything less, and the odds favored Vingegaard.
When I issued my pessimistic proclamation on Pogačar, the Slovenian led Remco Evenepoel by one minute, six seconds. Vingegaard was in third, a minute and 14 seconds in arrears. Not only that, Stage 11 had showed the futility of Pogačar’s primary mode of attack.
Pogačar woke up Saturday morning up a minute and 14 seconds on his rival. He went to bed Sunday night with three minutes and nine seconds in hand over Vingegaard, more than five minutes on Evenepoel, and double digits on the rest of the field.
On Stage 14, Pogačar did something unusual to extend his lead: He told Adam Yates to attack on the final climb, Pla d’Adet. UAE had hitherto declined to use its multiple grand tour-quality domestiques as tactical foils, and Yates was nearly seven minutes down on GC at the time. Vingegaard ignored Yates, as he should have—the Brit was no threat.
But Pogačar’s plan—made up on the spot, according to Yates—was to bridge across to his teammate. And just as Vingegaard was starting to close the gap, Pogačar would reach Yates, who’d pull him just that little bit farther up the road. Visma-Lease a Bike, in its previous iterations, used a version this tactic—the satellite rider—all the time, sending Sepp Kuss or Wout van Aert into the break at the start of the day so they could help Vingegaard consolidate his advantage on his rivals later on. What’s unorthodox about Pogačar’s twist is that Yates made his move not at the beginning of the day, but only moments before the attack. That extra boost was just enough to help Pogačar make good his escape.
The decisive blow came on Stage 15. Visma-LAB set a horrendous pace over the stage’s five category-one-or-higher climbs. To give some context: By the foot of the final climb, the yellow jersey group had been winnowed to about a dozen riders. The closest thing to a peloton by day’s end started with 48th-place finisher Clément Russo of Groupama-FDJ, who led home a group of riders exactly 41 minutes behind Pogačar. Two thirds of the riders who finished the stage came in behind Russo.
When Vingegaard’s final domestique, Matteo Jorgenson, let go, only Yates and Evenepoel were still with the two favorites, and both of them dropped instantly when Vingegaard accelerated. But while Pogačar can accelerate past Vingegaard, Vingegaard has to ride Pogačar off his wheel, and by God he tried to.
The pair took about a kilometer to close the 40 seconds to Enric Mas and Richard Carapaz, the two remaining breakaway riders. Mas and Carapaz aren’t just some random pair of jamokes, by the way, these are serial grand tour contenders. And Vingegaard screamed past. After five kilometers, Vingegaard had put a minute into Evenepoel.
Kārlis Ozols, who runs the Cycling Graphs Twitter account, said that by power normalized for altitude, Evenepoel was in the midst of the third-best climbing performance of the 21st century. No. 4 was Pogačar the day before. I’ll let you guess who no. 1 and no. 2 were.
It was around this point, with five kilometers left, that Vingegaard checked back over his shoulder to see if Pogačar was still there. And Pogačar answered by emptying the tank. In the last five kilometers, Pogačar did as much damage to Vingegaard as Vingegaard had done to Evenepoel in the previous five.
Is a three-minute advantage safe, with this much climbing and a mountain time trial still to come? Probably not completely. And even if it were, I wouldn’t be inclined to make yet another grand proclamation I’d risk later having to reverse.
Pogačar figured out how to make a punch stick on Saturday. And on Sunday, he not only weathered the best that Visma-Lease a Bike could muster, he turned around and put Vingegaard on the canvas. Maybe Vingegaard has it in him to reverse the momentum. But it’ll take the greatest climbing performance of all time. Again.