'Lambs to the slaughter' lose out in Visma-UAE war of attrition - Tour de France Analysis

Geraint Thomas knew it was a doomed effort from the moment he joined the break on stage 7 of the Tour de France, but this is his final lap in July. What else could he do but rage against the dying of the light?

Still, on reaching the finish line at Mûr-de-Bretagne after the latest Tadej Pogačar-Jonas Vingegaard duel, Thomas had a succinct description for himself and his breakaway companions: “Lambs to the slaughter, mate.”

One imagines that plenty more in the peloton have the same gut feeling as the Ineos man after a week of racing. Seven stages into the Tour, the terms of engagement are being dictated each day by the same two (and occasionally three) teams. 

Vingegaard’s Visma | Lease a Bike squad have been keen to take the fight to Pogačar at every opportunity and UAE Team Emirates-XRG have responded in kind. Mathieu van der Poel and Alpecin-Deceuninck, meanwhile, have found common cause with both teams en route to stage wins and yellow jerseys, though the more lasting alignment of interests appears to be with Pogačar and UAE.

That was certainly the case in the frantic opening hour of racing on Friday, when Visma’s Wout van Aert was desperately trying to force his way into the early break. Every time he turned around, he saw UAE and Alpecin-Deceuninck were the teams shutting it down. 

That UAE-Alpecin coalition was always going to have the numbers it needed to push through its preferred agenda – a straight shoot-out at Mûr-de-Bretagne for Pogačar and Van der Poel – and so Thomas and company dangled about a minute off the front for much of the day before they were inexorably reeled in. 

Visma | Lease a Bike, of course, were keen to add their own addendum to the bill in the finale. In an echo of previous injections of pace at key moments on stages 1, 2, 4 and 6, Vingegaard’s team swarmed to the front with 30km to go, setting an infernal tempo on the approach to the first ascent of Mûr-de-Bretagne and creating a scramble for positions behind them.

Van Aert explained afterwards that they wanted to take some of the sting out of Pogačar’s accelerations by making the run-in to the final climb as demanding as possible. Although the Slovenian won the stage, they succeeded in part. He couldn’t shake off Vingegaard on the climb itself and the Dane pushed him all the way in the sprint at the top to boot.

The secondary intention behind the Visma probing was to burn off some of Pogačar’s teammates before the finale, though results there were mixed. The biggest damage to UAE was caused not by Visma, but by circumstances, as João Almeida came down heavily in a crash with 5km to go. 

Mercifully, the Portuguese rider looks set to continue in the race, but he has lost ten minutes. His podium chances are over, and it remains to be seen if his injuries will limit him when the race hits the high mountains.

In the here and now, meanwhile, Almeida’s crash left Pogačar a man short for the final climb after Tim Wellens swung off with 1.8km to go. Whether due to Almeida’s absence or the headwind at the top, Pogačar was – by his immense standards – relatively cautious here. He unsheathed one, testing acceleration that only Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) could match before knocking off the pace and waiting for reinforcements when the road flattened out.

And a reinforcement duly arrived beneath the flamme rouge. All Visma’s earlier work hadn’t managed to burn off Jhonathan Narváez. When the front group swelled to ten, the Ecuadorian came thundering to the front and produced a long, long lead-out for Pogačar to sprint to victory.

As Het Nieuwsblad put it: “Visma continue to look for cracks, but they haven’t found them yet.” Then again, maybe the cracks were never likely to be visible this early in the race. The idea, it seems, is to make a thousand cuts from here to the mountains and see if Pogačar starts to bleed there. 

Some reckon it might prove counterproductive. In his column in BT, Vingegaard’s predecessor as a Danish Tour champion, Bjarne Riis, has been withering in his assessment of Visma’s tactics.

“I simply don't understand it. Why is Visma racing the way they are? It ends up as a lot of wasted effort,” Riis wrote of their actions on stage 6. “In my opinion, they don’t do much right – and almost everything wrong.” 

He’ll doubtless feel his point holds for stage 7, where Visma tried to force an opening but then Vingegaard was passive on the climb of Mûr-de-Bretagne, content to follow Pogačar rather than test him with an acceleration of his own.

“Vingegaard shouldn't be afraid to take risks. In the pursuit of picking up minutes, he should be willing to lose seconds here and there,” Riis wrote on Thursday. “But he just didn't do that on Thursday, and he's wearing his team down instead.”

The approach has also been the subject of some studied bafflement from Pogačar, but one imagines the opinions of the Slovenian and of Riise will do little to change the instructions crackling over the radio earpieces at Visma. Their strategy has been clear from day one and the fruits of those labours can’t be judged until the Tour hits the mountains.

In the meantime, there will be plenty more riders feeling like lambs to the slaughter as Visma and UAE’s war of attirition continues.