Were Pogacar’s rivals right to wait after his crash? – Tour de France Analysis

Sometimes, the unwritten rules of cycling can be applied more firmly than the real ones. Other times, they’re cast aside as if they were just a fussy piece of etiquette from a bygone age with no relevance to the present day.

Stage 11 of the Tour de France saw both extremes. There was a frenetic, typically 2020s start to proceedings, with the race having all the order of a barroom brawl amid a rolling maul of attacks. 

After a couple of hours of racing, however, with the break seemingly established, a détente of sorts looked to have been called. Tadej Pogačar and other grandees stopped for a natural break, but, to their surprise, the attacking didn’t cease, and they had to chase back on at warp speed.

“There are no rules anymore,” Mark Renshaw complained over the radio to his XDS-Astana riders, an admonishment relayed by the host broadcaster. And it all fed neatly into the narrative of 2020s cycling as a relentless, remorseless slugfest that waits for no man.

Yet the mood music was very different in the finale in Toulouse. In keeping with the rhythms of the modern Tour, a day for the break still had a GC twist, with Jonas Vingegaard and his Visma | Lease a Bike teammate Matteo Jorgenson taking turns to attack over the final climb, the short, sharp Côte de Pech David, with Tadej Pogačar responding in person.

Rather than ambling together towards Toulouse, it was clear that the race was very much ‘on’ among the GC contenders. The pace and tension remained high in the closing kilometres in that very reduced yellow jersey group, which was still splintering amid attack and counterattack.

4km from the finish, Pogačar was brought down when Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility) moved from left to right in front of him. For a dizzying few seconds, it looked as if the Tour had been turned on its head. Pogačar remounted quickly, but his chain had come off, and he lost more time grappling with it. He was more than 20 seconds down by the time he got going again, and he stood to lose upwards of half a minute if the yellow jersey continued at its previous intensity.

Word of the crash filtered through quickly via radio, however, and a decision was quickly reached in the yellow jersey group to slow and wait for Pogačar. The most common version of the tale says that maillot jaune Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) suggested a slowdown to Vingegaard, who immediately agreed.

Ilan Van Wilder indicated that his Soudal-QuickStep leader, Remco Evenepoel, had played a key role in the decision. “I didn’t see anything about the crash. I honestly didn't know Tadej had fallen, but Remco shouted, ‘Stop, stop, stop!’” Van Wilder told Sporza. “Everyone stopped, but I had no idea why. It wasn’t until I reached the finish that I saw he was injured. I was absolutely blown away. I didn’t really understand why we had stopped the race.”

But that’s splitting hairs. The key point is that somebody made the call and nobody dissented from it. Even amid the tumult of the finale of a Tour stage, there was no break from the consensus that the unwritten etiquette of cycling should be applied.

“We waited for him, as we should,” Vingegaard said. “If it happens like this, it’s pure bad luck. The crash wasn't because he went too fast through a corner, but because he hit another rider. So this was the right way to handle it.”

That view was echoed over at the EF and Soudal-QuickStep buses, while UAE Team Emirates-XRG manager Mauro Gianetti was effusive in his thanks for the “great sportsmanship” of Pogačar’s rivals.

The counterargument, however, is that the race was very much in full flight and Pogačar, though the defending champion, is not the yellow jersey of the Tour, having conceded the lead to Healy on stage 10. Was there any onus on Vingegaard et al to wait? That’s the trouble with unwritten rules – there’s no small print to shore up the minor details.

Or, as Daniel Benson put it in his synopsis, “Would they have waited for Florian Lipowitz or Oscar Onley if they had crashed under similar circumstances? The answer is a firm no, which suggests they waited for Pogačar because of his reputation and stature.”

Rightly or wrongly, they did wait, and Pogačar thus remains the best placed of the favourites in the overall standings, 29 seconds down on Healy and still a minute clear of Evenepoel and 1:17 up on Vingegaard. 

The Tour waits for no man? Not quite. It depends on the man, and it depends on the circumstances, as stage 11 illustrated.

On Thursday, the race hits the high mountains with a summit finish at Hautacam. There, another unwritten rule will shake up the general classification all over again: the law of the strongest.