Déjà vu: Even on his best day, Vingegaard can't find a way to trouble Pogacar

For the first time on this Tour de France, Jonas Vingegaard raced on the front foot. Midway up the Col du Haag, he dispatched his teammate Sepp Kuss to set the tempo in the yellow jersey group before upping the ante with a long effort of his own.

Vingegaard would have been encouraged by UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s surprising signs of weakness on the lower slopes. Brandon McNulty and Adam Yates had faded quickly from the picture, while Isaac del Toro was flickering at the rear of the group.

After stretching out the front group, Vingegaard glanced hopefully over his shoulder to check on how Tadej Pogačar was coping with the pace he was setting. But reading Pogačar’s face for clues is like interpreting the Mona Lisa; just as Miguel Induráin used to do in situations like this, he wore an expression somewhere between a grimace and a smile. Figure it out if you can. “It’s like when you suffer, but in a good way,” he would explain in the press conference later.

Vingegaard had little option but to hope Pogačar’s suffering was a little less joyous than normal and press on. But he surely guessed what was coming. 1500m from the top of the Col du Haag, Pogačar launched his inevitable acceleration. Vingegaard, as he always does, limited the damage at first before the world champion edged further and further clear. 

It was a dispiritingly familiar story from there for Vingegaard. He was clearly the best of the rest behind Pogačar, but the generosity of his efforts in the chase meant that he was jumped by Del Toro and Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM) in the final metres.

No matter, the only deficit that counts for Vingegaard is the one to Pogačar, and he now trails his old rival by 4:30. He’s seen this movie before. Not so much death by a thousand cuts, as death by déjà vu.  

Vingegaard tried to put an optimistic gloss on his afternoon when he spoke to TV2 after the stage, even if his best and most aggressive climbing display of the Tour so far had seen him concede another 54 seconds to Pogačar. 

“I got the answer that my legs are extremely good,” Vingegaard said. “I think I was riding really well, and I’m happy with how I rode.”

Despite Pogačar’s clear superiority in recent Julys, Vingegaard has often looked to be producing the best numbers of his career even when he trails in the wake of the Slovenian. He was well inside Marco Pantani’s old record even when he was soundly beaten by Pogačar at Plateau de Beille two years ago, and he was quicker than the old record when the world champion went supernova on the Tourmalet on stage 6.

In his press conference at Le Markstein, however, Pogačar pushed back against the idea that he is racing against the very best version of Vingegaard at this Tour. 

“If my power meter is correct – and I was looking down when he was pulling – he did an amazing performance on the front, but I think, honestly, he’s missing a little bit compared to last few Tours,” Pogačar said. “Maybe in the longer mountains, like Alpe d’Huez, maybe he gets this extra boost and maybe he drops me there, so you never know. 

“I think he’s there, he’s really strong, and I think he knows this. But I think he also knows that he just misses a little bit of a punch, maybe. It’s a small percentage and he’s there with me, I think.”

Pogačar’s assessment might not be too far off the mark. Vingegaard is racing this Tour on the back of his victory at the Giro d’Italia in May, and he acknowledged that his Italian exertions had blunted some of his sharpness for the Tour. 

“We knew after the Giro that I might not be the most explosive version of myself,” Vingegaard said. “If I’m going to try to ride away from someone, it’s probably going to be more on the long, hard stretch, and that’s why we first tried to set a hard pace with Sepp Kuss, and then I took over, but there was a small descent, and from it went up for a couple of kilometres without being really steep.”

Vingegaard’s hope, it seems, is that his Giro endurance will stand him in good stead in the final days of this Tour, which features back-to-back finishes at Alpe d’Huez. He won the 2023 race, after all, in the space of two dizzying days in the Alps, but he knows that the lie of the land is very different here.

It’s a different Pogačar, for one thing. There is no indication that he is remotely vulnerable to the kind of travails he suffered on the Col du Granon in 2022 or the Col de la Loze in 2023. And in any case, Pogačar is also constructing a watertight insurance policy against any late surprises in the Alps, given that his lead is already edging towards five minutes and likely to grow still further at Plateau de Solaison on Sunday.

Even the apparent fatigue among Pogačar’s teammates – at least among the men charged with shepherding him on the final climb – doesn’t seem like an undue problem. This all-conquering iteration of Pogačar looks well equipped to solve all conundrums by himself, and Vingegaard’s Visma guard is betraying its own signs of wear and tear.

Visma’s relative lack of depth meant that their Tour team features three of the riders who lined up with Vingegaard at the Giro, and they all appear to be paying for their efforts here, against a much deeper field. Victor Campenaerts and Davide Piganzoli haven’t been able to replicate their Giro displays, and Kuss’ cameo was limited in its effect.

Elsewhere, Matteo Jorgenson has been nursing an illness, and Bruno Armirail has been affected by a crash earlier in the Tour. Last year, Visma had the collective might to irritate Pogačar, if not necessarily trouble him. So far on this Tour, they haven’t even achieved that.

Visma put three riders in the sizeable early break on Saturday, but none of the trio – Campenaerts, Jorgenson and Armirail – ever looked likely to serve as a satellite rider for Vingegaard. It’s doubtful that their presence had any material difference on how UAE approached managing the stage.

In the finale, Vingegaard’s best climbing day of the Tour so far turned out just like all the others before it. He asked what questions he could, but Pogačar gave his usual answer.