Pogacar broke Pantani's record at Alpe d'Huez. Everyone else chased a phantom

Records are there to be broken, after all, even those set during the rough and rowdy days of the 1990s when there was no test for EPO. Only last week, Josh Kerr broke Hicham El Guerrouj’s 27-year-old mile record. In athletics as in cycling, advances in equipment, nutrition and training are all cited as contributing factors when decades-old records are broken.

But there are abyssal differences between the sports too. Kerr may be the fastest miler of all-time, but he remains eminently beatable over four laps of the track. He lost the Paris 2024 Olympics to a surprising Cole Hocker and Jakob Ingebrigtsen has regularly had his number.

Pogačar, by contrast, is completely without peer, and that point was hammered home as forcefully as ever on stage 19 of the Tour de France, where the Slovenian simply did as he pleased all over again.

It was all the more remarkable given the apparent vulnerabilities of his UAE Team Emirates-XRG guard, which had been struck by illness in the third week of the Tour, with Brandon McNulty abandoning on Thursday and Tim Wellens barely making it home inside the time limit.

The reduced firepower of his team meant that Pogačar was some 3:30 behind a high-calibre group of escapees when he hit the foot of the Alpe, but the world champion gave the impression he had the strength to overcome any head start against any opposition when he launched his acceleration 12km from the top.

The leading trio was composed of Grand Tour winners Richard Carapaz and Sepp Kuss, as well as the on-form Lenny Martinez. In ordinary circumstances, their buffer at the foot of the Alpe would have been enough for riders of that quality to fend off the chasers, but everything about the Pogačar era is extraordinary.

Pogačar quickly set about chipping away at their advantage. A long turn from teammate Adam Yates, dropped from the break, seemed to temper Pogačar’s progress, but the respite on the Briton’s rear wheel gave him renewed impetus for his assault at the summit.

He caught Kuss with a shade over 2km to go before closing in on Carapaz and Martinez shortly afterwards. Perhaps surprisingly, Pogačar needed a couple of attempts to shake them off, but the outcome was never in doubt.

Further down the mountain, meanwhile, the riders who were notionally Pogačar’s general classification rivals were engaged in a different race altogether. When Pogačar launched his initial, seated attack with 11.8km remaining, none of them even deigned to lift themselves from the saddle and offer token pursuit. 

The only man who might have done so, Jonas Vingegaard, had already left the race after breaking his collarbone last Sunday. The Dane’s chances of beating this version of Pogačar were always slender in the extreme – as the first two weeks proved – but he still rode this Tour as though he were in a genuine contest with his old rival.

Remco Evenepoel and Paul Seixas, by contrast, were under no such illusions here. When Pogačar disappeared from view, they might have felt something close to relief. His attack liberated them to set about fighting their own private battles against Del Toro for the second and third steps of the podium.

They knew they were never in the same bike race as Pogačar, and the time gaps at the summit demonstrated as much. Evenepoel’s time of 37:55 on the Alpe was quicker than Lance Armstrong in 2001 and Miguel Induráin in 1995, but he was still 2:29 down on Pogačar at the finish line.

Evenepoel is an astounding talent, and he is very possibly in the best form of his life on this Tour. His strikingly gaunt facial features certainly suggest that this is the leanest he has ever been at a Grand Tour. 

And yet even this new and improved version of Evenepoel, who moved to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe expressly because of their ability to prepare him for July, is light years off Pogačar’s latest supersonic iteration. 

19 stages into the best Grand Tour performance of his career, Evenepoel is a fine second overall but a dispiriting 7:11 behind Pogačar. If Pogačar opts to keep doing Pogačar things on the Tour’s return to Alpe d’Huez on Saturday, Evenepoel risks reaching Paris even further down than in 2024, when he placed third overall at 9:18. All that effort and all that progress just to keep standing still. Such is the grim reality of life in the Pogačar era, where the Slovenian keeps pushing the bar higher and higher.

The men vying to succeed Pogačar in the years ahead, Del Toro and Seixas, were also handed another reality check by the yellow jersey. Del Toro came home 2:41 down, with Seixas at 2:45. 

Both men have made extraordinary Tour debuts, and at least one of them will stand on the podium in Paris on Sunday. All signs point to them being the future of Grand Tour racing – but the man at the top of the pyramid shows no sign of relinquishing his crown any time soon. 

The headlines on Friday were about Pogačar racing Pantani’s ghost up the Alpe, even if he insisted that breaking the 31-year-old record hadn’t even crossed his mind on the ascent. But the story of the day, of this Tour, and of this whole era is that everyone else was chasing a phantom up the mountain.