BARCELONA –
Twelve seconds. That's the margin Jonas Vingegaard put into Tadej Pogačar in the opening stage of the Tour de France on the streets of Barcelona on Saturday. In the thick, tattered ledger of a three-week race, it is almost nothing. A gust of wind turns into an echelon; a few bonus seconds atop Alpe d’Huez. Twelve seconds is not really the point with 20 stages to go. The point is that Vingegaard is here to play.
It has been just over two years since Vingegaard lay on the tarmac at the Itzulia Basque Country stage race with a fractured collarbone, broken ribs, one bruised lung and another collapsed one pinning him to the ground while, by his own account, he wasn't thinking about racing at all.
"It will always be a part of my book, laying there on the ground believing that I'm going to die," Vingegaard said after Saturday's team time trial, speaking to a press room full of journalists quietly buzzing that we might have a race on our hands. A Dutch reporter suggested the yellow jersey represents some kind of closure on those two years. "Coming to this point is a bit emotional,” Vingegaard said, agreeing.
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