Tour de France: Can the best rider beat the best team? 🇫🇷 🔮
Analysing the battle for the yellow jersey after the first key mountain stage
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What did we learn from the first mountain stage of this year’s Tour de France to Le Mont-Dore Puy de Sancy?
Well, firstly, Simon Yates didn’t rest on his laurels after his Giro d’Italia win, and that Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard continue to shadow each other throughout this year’s race.
They’ve been relatively inseparable through the first week, save for the Caen time trial, which will come as a welcome boost for Visma-Lease a Bike following a poor Critérium du Dauphiné, in which the Slovenian looked head and shoulders clear of his principal rival.
The gap between the two main favourites at the Tour has narrowed, but the 1:17 lead that Pogačar holds over his primary challenger still gives him an edge ahead of the Pyrenees.
The main GC takeaway from stage 10 wasn’t that both riders locked horns and effectively called a truce in the closing kilometres of the final climb, but that Vingegaard’s team appears more complete, more aggressive, and generally stronger at this stage of the race. Their concentrated aggression on stage 10 didn’t yield any gains, but isolating Pogačar from all his teammates on relatively short mountain terrain should give them a huge confidence boost. The question is whether they can convert this collective dominance into a real advantage in the GC.
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Pogačar cuts a lonely figure 🇸🇮
Coming into the race, the potential weakness for UAE Team Emirates - although it was hard to pinpoint - was on the flat. Edoardo Affini and Wout van Aert could cause serious damage in the crosswinds, but Pogačar made it through Stage 1.
Tim Wellens and Nils Politt seem unbeatable, and it shouldn’t be forgotten that they were immense on stage 10. However, the loss of João Almeida and Pavel Sivakov's illness has left Pogačar’s team vulnerable. It’s not just that, though - Adam Yates isn’t at the same level as Matteo Jorgenson, Vingegaard, or Sepp Kuss, while Jhonatan Narváez is explosive and versatile but struggles to maintain the pace on those 4,000-plus metre mountain stages.
"Of course, it's never easy to lose the yellow jersey. But we lost João Almeida yesterday, and Pavel Sivakov is still recovering from his illness. We did a great job, and now it's a day off, and it's good that I don't have the yellow jersey. Honestly, I'm most happy not to be talking to journalists," Pogačar told RTV Slovenia after seeing Ben Healy rode into the yellow jersey.
"They were a bit annoying with all the attacks, so I decided to make a better attack. I saw that Lenny Martinez was ahead of me from the break and crossed the finish line behind him. It means a lot more to him than to me,” he said when asked about Visma’s stop-start attacks.
Reading between the lines, it’s worth noting that while Kuss and Jorgenson attacked, Vingegaard didn’t eat any wind all day, conserved his energy, only going full throttle when Pogačar grew frustrated and chose to attack. He’s not rattled, but that kind of move could have a cumulative effect later in the race. I’m not for a second suggesting that UAE Team Emirates-XRG are in trouble, but they need to be far more calculating with their resources than Visma right now. Their second-best rider is out of the race, another one is sick, and as we said, Adam Yates hasn’t quite found his best legs just yet.