For nearly 2,700km of the Tour de France, Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar were inseparable. Yet in just 48 hours of mountain racing, a yawning divide has opened between them after the defending champion crushed his Slovenian rival in the Alps.
Vingegaard now looks assured of final victory after the 2023 Tour’s highest stretch of road proved to be Pogacar’s graveyard. “I’m gone, I’m dead,” the UAE Emirates rider radioed to his team car, 7.6km from the top of the 2,304m Col de la Loze.
Racing jersey unzipped to the waist, he finally relinquished any hopes of winning in Paris, and slipped behind the yellow jersey group, powered by Vingegaard’s unflagging Jumbo-Visma team.
Pogacar, victim of a seemingly innocuous tumble after a touch of wheels earlier in the day, said the stage had been one of his “worst days on the bike” but he “had to keep fighting”. He said: “I just couldn’t go today. It was not a good day. I hope to recover and we can go for another stage on stage 20. I think if we can aim for a stage win inside the team and keep the podium with me and Adam [Yates], that’s a good finish.”
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Ahead of the pair, Felix Gall soloed to victory in Courchevel. The Austrian, of the AG2R Citroën team, attacked alone at the foot of the Loze and maintained his lead on chaser Simon Yates over the summit, through the narrow winding descent, and on to the 18 per cent gradients leading to the finish line on Courchevel altiport.
But in-race vehicles were again the focus of attention after Vingegaard’s progress was blocked on a steep, unbarriered bend towards the top of the Loze by a melee of fans, race vehicles and media motorbikes. Unlike last weekend’s incident on the Col de Joux Plane, the race leader was this time forced to stop and pause, while a path was cleared.
Afterwards Vingegaard’s sports director, Grischa Niermann, described the holdup as a “big chaos” and said there were “way too many people on the road.” Niermann also addressed the growing scepticism towards Vingegaard’s domination of this race. “It’s part of the job that people doubt us or doubt the riders,” he said. “Jonas had 10 controls in the last three days. He cannot prove more. We do everything we can to go as fast as possible and do the best preparation we can do, and that’s why he is so special.”
Asked if Vingegaard was using any form of external performance enhancements, Niermann said: “I’m not the doctor, I’m also not the trainer and I’m not Jonas, but I think he’s said a hundred thousand times that there is no performance‑enhancing stuff, which is not allowed, and I’m 100 per cent putting my fingers in the fire for that.”
Asked how he could further placate his sceptics, Vingegaard said: “It’s hard to tell what more you can say. I understand that it’s hard to trust in cycling with the past there has been, but I think nowadays everyone is different to how it was from 20 years ago.
“I can tell, from my heart, that I don’t take anything. I don’t take anything I wouldn’t give to my daughter and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”
In two days of racing, Pogacar has lost well over seven minutes to Vingegaard and is now 7 min 35 sec behind him. “I don’t know what happened, but I came really empty to the bottom of the [last] climb,” Pogacar said.
The duel in the sun is now very much over, but the polemics over Vingegaard’s domination of this Tour appear to just be beginning.
