Vingegaard keeps Tour de France alive with Ventoux offensive - Analysis

Tadej Pogačar smashed a seemingly unbreakable record on the slopes of Mont Ventoux on Tuesday afternoon, yet there is still a flicker of life in this Tour de France as a contest. It would have seemed like a contradiction in terms before the start, but bike racing on the Giant of Provence has a habit of provoking cognitive dissonance.

Although Pogačar added two more seconds to his lead over Jonas Vingegaard in the closing metres, the Dane might have come away from Mont Ventoux the happier of the pair, buoyed both by his own best performance of the Tour thus far and by the most harmonious display from his Visma | Lease a Bike squad since Lille.

During Monday’s rest day, Vingegaard and Visma found themselves fending off barbs from Pogačar about their discordant showing on the road to Carcassonne on Sunday. Bjarne Riis even viewed the minor and ultimately inconsequential fiasco as proof of Trine Marie Vingegaard Hansen’s concerns about her husband’s team.

The response came on stage 16, where Visma outflanked UAE Team Emirates-XRG at every turn and where Vingegaard managed to lay a glove on Pogačar for the first time at this Tour – even if there was no indication, of course, that the champion’s legs were wobbling beneath him at any point.

Pogačar absorbed Vingegaard’s fierce initial onslaught, composed of vicious accelerations 9km from the top, 7.5km from home and with 4km remaining. Vingegaard probed again nearer the summit, but Pogačar was always able to follow, and almost always seated to boot. Although he wore an occasional grimace, he still made it look dishearteningly easy at times.

And yet Vingegaard will still be rightly encouraged by how he withstood Pogačar’s counterpunch with 1.5km remaining. Indeed, it was something of a collector’s item – one of the few Pogačar accelerations of his 2024-2025 iteration that didn’t create separation. Human after all?

“No, I’m definitely not Superman,” Pogačar said afterwards. “I was born in Ljubljana, not Krypton or wherever Superman was born.”

From there, Vingegaard and Pogačar rode to the summit together, even if the yellow jersey couldn’t resist ripping away to win the sprint for fifth and extend his overall lead to 4:15. Miguel Induráin would have been happy to roll home alongside a rival on a day like this, but, rightly or wrongly, Pogačar rarely passes up the opportunity to prove a point.

Although stage victory fell to Valentin Paret-Peintre (Soudal-QuickStep) from the day’s break, Pogačar and Vingegaard were more than a minute quicker than Iban Mayo’s eyewatering record on Mont Ventoux, which was established in a mountain time trial in 2004, three years before the doping case that ended his career.

Whatever way you parse it, the climbing time here is evidence that Vingegaard’s claims about being in the form of his life before this Tour should be taken at face value. This was, by any metric, a performance of a stratospherically high level from both Pogačar and Vingegaard. 

At Hautacam last week, Pogačar was several rungs ahead of Vingegaard, and he pressed home his superiority by tacking on another 36 seconds at Peyragudes the next day. The Visma man reckoned afterwards that he had produced “probably” his best ever performance at Peyragudes, and it was surely dispiriting to realise how much better Pogačar had been. 

After breaking even on the Ventoux, however, Vingegaard will carry a degree of hope into the Alps, even if the hefty overall deficit means his path to victory in Paris remains as narrow as ever.

If Vingegaard fought out a score draw with Pogačar, then Visma doled out something of a drubbing to UAE Team Emirates-XRG, who left the yellow jersey conspicuously low on foot soldiers on the slopes of Mont Ventoux. Pogačar can solve most problems by himself, mind, but it was still striking how little help his climbing domestiques were able to offer here. For the first time in the race, the absence of João Almeida was keenly felt.

Nils Politt, arguably Pogačar’s MVP, was able to control affairs on the long flat run-in to Mont Ventoux, together with Tim Wellens, but Adam Yates was of notably limited assistance to his leader once the road climbed.

Pavel Sivakov and Marc Soler had been dispatched into the sizeable early break with the idea of dropping back to support Pogačar when needed, but neither man was able to offer anything more than a cursory turn on Mont Ventoux.

That was in stark contrast with the effervescent showings from Vingegaard’s supporting cast. Visma have attempted to be bold on this race before, most notably at Hautacam, but they didn’t have the firepower to execute their plans. This time out, they produced a strong collective display, even with Matteo Jorgenson marked absent in the finale.

Wout van Aert set an electric pace into the foot of Mont Ventoux, but Vingegaard’s MVP was arguably Sepp Kuss, who showed notable flashes of his 2023 form with a searing pace-making stint on the wickedly steep road through the forest ahead of Chalet Reynard.

Like Pogačar, Vingegaard had two teammates in the break. Unlike Sivakov and Soler, Tiejs Benoot and Victor Campanaerts were able to produce sustained pace-making turns for their leader when they dropped back.

For the first time since Lille, Visma looked something like the unit that topped Pogačar in both 2022 and 2023. And Vingegaard, too, looked an entirely different rider to the one who floundered at Hautacam.

They will be encouraged to probe UAE Team Emirates-XRG even more when the race hits the Pyrenees on Thursday, with the Col du Glandon and the Col de la Madeleine featuring ahead of the summit finish on the Col de la Loze. 

“We don’t know exactly where we’ll attack, but at least we have the mindset that there’s nothing to lose,” Kuss said afterwards.

The problem, of course, is that this iteration of Pogačar doesn’t seem remotely as vulnerable as the version who conceded “I’m gone, I’m on dead” on the slopes of the Loze two years ago.

But even so, Vingegaard and Visma have reason to try. There’s still only one, overwhelming favourite, but the bike race is somehow still on – a notion that seemed fanciful at Hautacam.