Tadej Pogačar is racing this Tour de France like it’s much closer than it is. Or like he’s not the one winning it. Or like it hurt him, which maybe it did.
He will not stop attacking. He can’t help himself. He has a three-minute lead to his closest rival, appears to be the strongest rider in the race, with the strongest team, and he will not stop. He called it a “stupid instinct” in his press conference on Wednesday, with a sly little smile, but one he clearly has no intention of suppressing.
And why would he? Thus far this race it’s working. The thing about his style is that its effectiveness is quite binary. It will either work, and he will win, or it will not, he will crack, and he will lose. It’s an enormous (and frankly welcome) departure from the conservative approach to winning the Tour via consistency, 150-kilometer lead-outs, and waiting around for others to have a bad day.
UAE Team Emirates wanted a big break to go early, teammate Marc Soler said, soaking up all available time bonuses while the GC group could duke it out over the last few cols. But the crosswinds at the start made everyone nervous, and the incessant low-grade climbing through the middle of the stage meant that any moves that did go could hardly get anywhere. “It was weird,” said Bahrain Victorious’ Jack Haig, one of those trying to make something stick. “Everybody was so fucked that they’d just get 100 meters up the road, then sit there, and somebody would bridge across and it would all come back.” So the escape didn’t happen until late, and the whole stage was harder for it.
A hard day seems to be Pogačar’s cue. He hit out on the second-to-last climb, the Col du Noyer, wiggling in that trademark on-the-hoods, upright style, and came across the top with a decent gap. Vingegaard tried to follow, with Evenepoel just behind.
Imagine being his sports director. You’re UAE’s Andrej Hauptman, sitting in the passenger seat of a UAE-wrapped Audi, radio in hand. Does the radio work? You wonder. Because it doesn’t seem to be working. You laid out a plan that morning: it’s a hard day but there’s a harder one coming tomorrow, let’s see if we can get Marc Soler in the breakway, otherwise we play a bit of defense. And now this.
Attacks beget attacks, which is why most GC riders in Pogačar’s position wouldn’t take the risk of trying. We saw it with Remco Evenepoel up to Superdévoluy. After helping pull Jonas Vingegaard back across to Pogačar on the descent and through the valley, he set out on his own as the two superstars watched each other, taking 10 seconds back on both of them. It moves him within two minutes of Vingegaard, and if anything he looked the better of the two. Absent Pogačar’s first attack, which removed almost all domestiques from the equation, Evenepoel probably doesn’t make his move either.
So why, if it mostly adds risk, does Pogačar do it? He doesn’t really answer the question when asked, shrugging and smiling and telling us it was a bad idea but he did it anyway. Former Giro d’Italia winner Tom Dumoulin, now working for broadcaster NOS as an analyst, put forth a theory: “He does this purely to annoy Vingegaard,” he said. “He’s finally the boss again and he finally has the legs to hurt Vingegaard again. Now he thinks: now you’ll get it back.”
It’s not a bad theory. Of the two, Pogačar and Vingegaard, Pogačar does seem to approach racing with more ego. That isn’t a slight; ego and confidence make him so fun to watch. Few entertainers lack both. This is not a rider who likes losing, and you get the sense that he’d like nothing more than to dig a hole, drop in last year’s stage 17 failure, and shovel a pile of stage wins and a yellow jersey right on top.
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