After UAE Team Emirates dominated stage 14, the Visma-Lease a Bike team of second-placed overall Jonas Vingegaard took the Tour de France into their hands on the second day in the Pyrenees. They tried. Oh, how they tried. But Tadej Pogačar proved yet again that he’s in charge of this race with a third stage victory and another chunk of time on the Plateau de Beille.
At the end of 15 stages, Pogačar now leads the race by over three minutes to Vingegaard, who himself has a tighter grip on second with Remco Evenepoel struggling to keep pace in the last 10 km.
- With the race going straight up the Category 1 Col de Peyresourde from kilometre zero, it was a long drawn-out battle for the breakaway on Bastille Day. A number of French riders tried to bag themselves tickets for the move, with mixed success – Guillaume Martin (Cofidis) and Lenny Martinez (Groupama-FDJ) made it but couldn’t last the day – while Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe was particularly motivated to deliver a something in the absence of Primož Roglič.
- Alas, the breakaway’s hopes were dashed by the GC group once again. Only this time, it was Visma-Lease a Bike who made the combined decision to bash their heads against the might of UAE Team Emirates.
- Only five breakaway riders survived to the foot of the 15.8-kilometre Plateau de Beille, Hindley, Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost), Enric Mas (Movistar), Laurens De Plus (Ineos Grenadiers) and Tobias Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility). But with the yellow jersey group just 2:35 down, their sometimes half-hearted efforts to extricate themselves from one another was barely more than entertainment for viewers at home as the Visma domestiques worked away at the gap.
- A resurgent Wilco Kelderman had done a good job on the run-in to the final climb where Matteo Jorgenson got stuck in and shredded the group with a fierce pace. The Paris-Nice winner managed to get rid of most of the top 10 and a number of domestiques including UAE’s Marc Soler and João Almeida, leaving just his own leader Vingegaard, the yellow jersey, and Evenepoel on his tail, with UAE’s Adam Yates bobbing and weaving in the background.
- Up the road, Carapaz had finally got rid of the last of his rivals in the break, Mas and Johannessen finally beat, but chance had dwindled to nothing.
- Back in the yellow jersey group, Jorgenson made one last ragged acceleration with a little over 10 km remaining – the prelude to Vingegaard’s inevitable, devil-may-care attack.
- Pogačar was glued to Vingegaard’s wheel and could see what was coming just as well as we could at home, meaning he was ready to react when Jorgenson pulled off.
- Evenepoel, probably wisely, didn’t seem to even try to match his rivals’ acceleration, settling into his own pace for the remainder of the climb.
- The top two on GC carved through what remained of the break to take over the front of the race by 9 km-to-go, and for five kilometres, Vingegaard plugged away with the yellow jersey looming on his wheel.
- Both seemed solid until 5.4 km from the finish, when Vingegaard looked over his shoulder and flicked his elbow: ‘please may I have a pull?’ That moment of weakness was all Pogačar needed, and instead of moving gently into the lead position, he took it as a cue to leave his rival behind.
- Vingegaard could not react. The gap between he and the yellow jersey disappearing up the road hovered around 10 seconds for a few hundred metres, but Pogačar had five kilometres to increase the damage, and by the line, he’d put 1:08 into the Dane, with Evenepoel 2:51 down. Mikel Landa was the next to finish +3:54 after a spirited chase, which moves the Soudal-Quick Step rider up to fifth ahead of Carlos Rodríguez.
- With his third stage win of the race, Pogačar now leads the race by 3:09 over his arch-rival, Evenepoel rounding out the podium at +5:19. After that, the next rider is João Almeida more than 10 minutes down.
- There was another race going on a long time after the stage winner as the sprinters, and Mark Cavendish especially, tried desperately to make it home within the time cut. Not for the first time this race, this was a storyline that began halfway through the stage, and as Pogačar crested the Plateau de Beille, thoughts soon turned to the Manx Missile and his fellow fast men. In the end, the main grupetto crossed the line looking fairly relaxed, but there was a bit of a wait before Cavendish arrived with three teammates and about two minutes to spare. Next was Fernando Gaviria (Movistar), then Arnaud Démare (Arkéa-B&B Hotels) was the last man home just 45 seconds inside the time limit.
Stage 15 top 10:
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GC top 10:
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Quotes of the day:
Australian rider and Giro 2022 champion Jai Hindley was one of the more active riders of the day, writing the final chapter of his team’s efforts that began early in the stage. After being caught in the last 10 km, the Perth native finished 16th, eight minutes 44 seconds after Pogačar.
I’m pretty smashed!”
Hindley told media post-stage, looking pretty smashed.
Hindley’s companion in the breakaway, Uno-X Mobility’s Tobias Halland Johannessen, had a busy day which included having to chase back up to the front after being caught out in a split on the way to the Col d’Agnes. Johannessen was able to follow the attacks on the final climb until Carapaz made his move, only for the GC leaders ripped past them all.
For me, when those two guys went past it’s like I don’t do the same sport as them. They are way too good and you want to hate them, but they are cool guys and make cycling fun to watch, so it’s a bit hard. [They are] on another level.”
Johannessen said after finishing 11th on the stage.
In the GC race, Jorgenson was a loyal lieutenant once again for Vingegaard, and the American was asked post-stage if he was surprised that they were unable to drop Pogačar in what is thought to be Vingegaard’s territory.
He’s a super good rider, I’m not surprised. I believed in Jonas today, really I did. I believed that we could crack Pogačar. But in the end he’s one of the best riders in the world, Pogačar, so really, chapeau to him.”
Jorgenson said at the finish.
Brief analysis:
- Pogačar reportedly climbed the Plateau de Beille in just 39 minutes and 44 seconds, which is the fastest ever by almost four minutes. Of course, you can’t draw particularly clear conclusions from this sort of comparison, especially when the runner-up time was set by Marco Pantani at 43:28 in 1998, so a very very different era for all sorts of reasons. There’s also the question of how the climb was approached, how much attacking there might have been, how much cat and mouse might have been played, how long a tow might have lasted … However, added to yesterday’s extraordinary performance on Pla d’Adet, there’s no denying Pogačar is firmly in control of his destiny at this moment in time.
Up next
Stage 16 from Gruissan to Nîmes is the last chance for any sprinters hoping to cap off their Tour with a win, and make their struggle through the Pyrenees worth it. However, as with every stage in the third week, we can expect the battle for and in the breakaway to be fierce on the lumps and bumps that litter the stage’s 188.6 kilometres as opportunities for riders of all shapes and sizes dwindle as the 2024 Tour builds to its finale in Nice.
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