Disrespectful or not, Tadej Pogacar's 'irreverent' gift reflected Tour reality

It didn’t escape anybody’s attention that Tadej Pogačar chose to strike a heavy psychological blow against his Tour de France rivals by slowing up to cede victory to his teammate Isaac del Toro on stage 2 in Barcelona.

An earlier iteration of Pogačar would doubtless have strived to snatch whatever time advantage he could on Jonas Vingegaard in a situation like this. These days, Pogačar’s dominance is such that he apparently doesn’t see the need to scrap for seconds quite like before.

He preferred to give a gift to his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate here and plant an ominous seed of doubt in the minds of Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and the rest while he was at it.

But that flex didn’t meet the approval of L’Équipe, the official mouthpiece of ASO and the Tour, with an editorial in Monday morning’s edition couching Pogačar’s gesture as a “form of irreverence and a punishment for his rivals.”

In L’Équipe’s view, the UAE one-two was a loaded response to Visma Lease a Bike’s team time trial victory on the opening day, designed to “showcase his dominance and humiliate Jonas Vingegaard and all his rivals.”

The newspaper seemed to view Pogačar’s gifting of victory to Del Toro as an affront to the Tour itself, describing it as “a form of irreverence towards the race – the very race that creates champions who are, in turn, expected to enhance its prestige and elevate its stature, rather than simply hand out prizes as if at a local criterium.”

L’Équipe had been broadly admiring in its coverage of Pogačar’s dominance through the 2020s, certainly in comparison with its often-jaundiced reaction to the Team Sky era, but there was a palpable shift in the company line during last year’s Tour.

On the final weekend, the newspaper complained that Pogačar’s “general bad mood” had been “been clouding and disrupting the atmosphere at the end of the Tour de France,” chastising the yellow jersey for appearing bored by his own dominance.

Pogačar, who wore a broad smile as he congratulated his teammate Del Toro on Sunday afternoon, might feel this is a public relations contest that he simply cannot win. 

And that’s nothing new in Tour history. The five-time winners Pogačar is seeking to emulate this July all at some point encountered a pressroom that, to varying degrees and for different and often valid reasons, simply grew tired of their dominance.

Bjarne Riis, who stopped Miguel Induráin’s bid for a sixth successive Tour victory in 1996, saw no issue with Pogačar’s strategy in the finale in Barcelona.

“He gave the victory away in the nicest way to his teammate and in a very respectful way,” Riis told Feltet. “It may be that the rest of the field feels humiliated, but that’s part of the game and the psychology.

“Pogačar needs his team and Del Toro above all, and that’s the most beautiful way to show appreciation for them. Should he just be selfish and go for it himself? They’d probably blame him for that too.”

Riis pointed out that Vingegaard had deliberately slowed to cede victory to Wout van Aert in the final time trial of the 2022 Tour, and he noted that the Dane had been bound by team strategy during Sepp Kuss’ Vuelta a España victory the following year.

“Do people remember when Jonas gave the time trial victory to Van Aert? Not to mention the Vuelta victory for Sepp Kuss (that one was probably on the edge, in my opinion),” Riis said. “What about Greg Lemond, who gave away victory on Alpe d’Huez in 1985 [1986 – ed.] to the Frenchman Hinault, who has never given anything away himself?”

Riis isn’t entirely correct there, given that Bernard Hinault gifted victory to Renault teammate Jean-René Bernaudeau in Sondrio after their raid over the Stelvio on the 1980 Giro d’Italia, but his general point holds. The unwritten rules of cycling have always been a nebulous sort of thing, but Grand Tour winners have been dispensing stage wins as favours long before Pogačar, and, whether you like the practice or not, they’ll continue to do so long after his current era of plenty comes to an end. 

And, lest we forget, on the final day of last year’s Tour of the Alps, Paul Seixas ceded what would have been his first pro win to his teammate Nicolas Prodhomme. It seems the next generation has already picked up a habit that has endured through the decades.

Even so, Pogačar’s actions in Barcelona were still quite different to the cited examples. Gift-giving from Tour patrons has tended to come when the race was already won, but Pogačar has started before he has even taken hold of the yellow jersey here. 

And there is also a difference between ceding the win to a breakaway companion and engineering a victory during a fraught and punchy finale, staring down your rivals while you do so. This felt like a message as much as a gift.

Still, when Feltet canvassed the opinions of riders before the start of stage 3, there seemed to be little complaint about Pogačar’s decision. UAE’s Adam Yates, unsurprisingly, defended the move. “If it was easy, there would be a lot more gifts in cycling,” he said. “You still need the engine and Isaac’s got the whole package.”

The thought was echoed by Decathlon CMA CGM road captain Tiesj Benoot, who dismissed the idea that Pogačar had been disrespectful to his rivals.

“No, not at all,” Benoot said. “If Del Toro wins, it’s because he was the strongest and there was nobody else there to beat him. If Tadej doesn’t pass him, I think it’s the smartest thing he could do at the start of the Tour, and Del Toro is maybe the second strongest rider in the race.”

And that, ultimately, is the nub of the matter. Disrespectful or not, Pogačar’s and UAE’s dominance is simply the reality. The peloton has long since learned to live with it.