Le Lioran brings Pogacar back to his last moment of Tour vulnerability
It’s almost exactly two years since Tadej Pogacar’s last moment of vulnerability at the Tour de France, and he will travel along that very stretch of road on Tuesday afternoon when the race returns to Le Lioran.
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Back then, Pogačar was still smarting from successive Tour defeats to Jonas Vingegaard, and there was a school of thought that the Dane was simply better suited to the race’s demands than his rival. Pogačar’s versatile talent made him cycling’s Roger Federer, but Vingegaard was clearly his Rafael Nadal, and the Tour seemed to be their Roland Garros.
The second half of the 2024 Tour ultimately proved the limits of that comparison, but at Le Lioran, it still seemed very relevant. Vingegaard had won in 2022 and 2023 by outlasting Pogačar in the second half of the race, and their duel at Le Lioran on stage 11 hinted at the possibility of a repeat.
Pogačar had retooled dramatically over the winter under the watch of Javier Sola, and he had arrived at the Tour after a crushing victory at the Giro d’Italia, while Vingegaard had endured a career-threatening crash at Itzulia Basque Country in April.
Through the opening week of the Tour, Pogačar had the upper hand, winning over the Col du Galibier and gaining more ground in the time trial to Gevrey-Chambertin. By the time the Tour hit the Massif Central, his lead over Vingegaard was 1:15.
When Pogačar pressed clear on the steep Puy Mary with 31km to go, it already looked like the Tour’s match point, especially when his buffer yawned out to half a minute on the descent. But then a curious thing happened.
Vingegaard caught fire on the 4km haul up the Col de Pertus, while Pogačar surprisingly began to betray signs of suffering. The Visma rider caught Pogačar on the climb and then struck another psychological blow by outlasting him in the uphill sprint to the line at Le Lioran.
Like in 2022 and 2023, it briefly looked as though Pogačar had again flown too close to the sun. He remained 1:14 ahead of Vingegaard on GC, but the old questions about Pogačar’s powers of endurance and his aptitude for racing amid soaring July temperatures suddenly resurfaced.
For a few days, the Tour looked like a contest again – at least until the race hit the Pyrenees, where Pogačar delivered successive supersonic climbing displays at Pla d’Adet and Plateau de Beille. Le Lioran proved to be an illusion.
Return
Pogačar seemed to be at his zenith in the summer of 2024, completing the Giro-Tour double by annexing a dozen stage wins across both races. But that, too, was an illusion. In the two years since, the Slovenian has continued to scale new heights, pushing himself further and further beyond the reach of even his most cussed rivals.
After holding everyone at arm’s length at last year’s Tour, Pogačar’s astonishing sequence of solo wins at the Kigali Worlds, the European Championships and Il Lombardia last autumn looked like his apotheosis, but then he went and topped it again with the sheer range of his one-day performances this spring.
Pogačar’s devastating displays at the Tour de Suisse and his crushing win over the Tourmalet on the Tour, meanwhile, strongly suggest that his trajectory is continuing to trend inexorably upwards. He reached the first rest day of the Tour already armed with a 2:42 buffer over Vingegaard, and the expectation is that he will cruise to a fifth Tour victory in Paris on July 26.
The Tour’s trek to Le Lioran on Tuesday, of course, will bring a reminder of Pogačar’s last moment of weakness in July, and perhaps even a warning about the dangers of overreach. But nothing about Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s disquieting dominance these past two years suggests they will pay a price for their efforts to this point on the Tour.
If anything, the memory of Le Lioran seems more likely to inspire aggression from Pogačar rather than caution, even though he downplayed the idea that he will be motivated by revenge when he returns there this week.
“It’s a different stage and it will be really hard to control the day and the breakaway and everything,” Pogačar said in his post-stage press conference on Sunday. “I’m not seeking any revenge or whatever. It was a good day back then also.”
Vingegaard, incidentally, is not convinced. In an appearance on TV2’s AftenTourchat show on Sunday evening, he was of the view that UAE would be especially motivated to prove a point in the Massif Central.
As in 2024, the stage features the category 1 Puy Mary (7.8km at 6%), the category 1 Col de Pertus (4.4km at 8.5%) and the category 3 Col de Font de Cère (3.1km at 5.8%) ahead of the finish at Le Lioran.
“Tuesday will be a really tough day, and I can imagine that the UAE will want to try to go for the stage win that day,” he said, sounding like a man already braced for impact. Vingegaard’s hope, it seems, is that his endurance will come to the fore in the Tour’s final week, as it did in 2022 and 2023.
“I felt a bit the same way in the Giro, I didn’t have the best start there,” Vingegaard said. “I got into the bike race better in the second and third weeks, and I got better and better, significantly better throughout the race. Of course, we also hope that I can be significantly better than I was on the Tourmalet. I believe I can do that, and the team believes so too.”
For both Pogačar and Vingegaard alike, Le Lioran has the look of a landmark day at this Tour.
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