PLATEAU DE SOLAISON, France — Let's make one thing clear: The crash that took Jonas Vingegaard out of the 2026 Tour de France was a racing incident.
It was not, on the balance of causation, due to a middle-of-the-night anti-doping wakeup and subsequent sleep loss, as Tadej Pogačar speculated in his post-race press conference, nor was it really the fault of the TV motorcycle riding in front of the peloton and slowing at the wrong time, as was posited by Visma-Lease a Bike sports director Marc Reef, who also dismissed the lack of sleep theory. It was an error, a small one to start, that cascaded as Visma, which was leading the peloton on the roads to the final climb, made its way through one of the dozens of roundabouts they navigated today alone.
Since this normally common and uneventful occurrence ended with the exit of one of the Tour's main protagonists, it's tempting to chuck blame in these moments. It's not surprising that Reef pointed at the moto, which does take some small sliver of fault, or that Pogačar wanted to associate an intrusive anti-doping test he also endured with an incident nearly universally grieved by cycling fandom. Lumping those things together does a bit of PR work for both parties. But the reality, when you break down the incident, is quite a bit more simple.
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