Tadej Pogacar: I expected Vingegaard to be much closer in Tour de France TT

What a difference a month makes. Tadej Pogačar’s sluggish performance in the time trial at the Critérium du Dauphiné meant that Jonas Vingegaard would surely have eyed stage 5 of the Tour de France as a chance to gain significant ground on his eternal rival.

Instead, the tables were turned on the flat and fast 33km course around Caen. Pogačar fell just short of denying Remco Evenepoel stage victory, but the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider had the considerable consolation of moving into the yellow jersey vacated by Mathieu van der Poel and putting more than a minute into Vingegaard.

In the overall standings, Pogačar leads Evenepoel by 42 seconds, while Vingegaard lies fourth at 1:13. There are still sixteen stages to go, of course, but Pogačar hasn’t held as big a buffer on Vingegaard this early in the Tour since the Dane’s 2021 debut, when he started in a domestique role.

“Yeah, for sure I was surprised, I’m not going to lie,” Pogačar said. “I was not expecting to be so far ahead of him in this TT. I was expecting him to be closer to Remco than me. Maybe he didn’t have the greatest day out there. It’s a flat TT and he’s the lightest of the three of us, so I guess it’s not the best suited to him. But it was unexpected, this kind of gap.

“Honestly, I was expecting him to be closer or even better than me. I thought if he had a similar day to Dauphiné, then I could be there with him. I had a better day today, but I was still expecting him to be much closer.”

That’s an understatement. Pogačar lost 2.79 seconds/km to Evenepoel in the shorter, hillier time trial at the Dauphiné, and he also conceded over 1.5 seconds/km to Vingegaard in the same test. By contrast, Pogačar was only 0.48 seconds/km slower than Evenepoel here, and over 1.9 seconds/km quicker than Vingegaard. 

That begged the question – what went so wrong at the Dauphiné and what changed so dramatically in the intervening period? 

“In the Dauphiné for sure, I paced myself completely wrong,” Pogačar said. “I did not get the same rush as here in the Tour. After Dauphiné, I was really disappointed with the time trial, I was thinking about every detail I got wrong. I was also maybe not hungry enough. 

“But I trained really well at Isola 2000 with the TT bike, and I started to believe myself again, that after the Dauphiné, I could do better. 

“Today I had really good rhythm, so when I heard I gained time in the first 5km already, I got more inspiration. I was super strong all the way to the finish line when I heard Remco was not putting too much time into me. It was good motivation to hear those times, so I’m really happy with the performance.”

Pogačar raced on Wednesday in the ASO-supplied king of the mountains skinsuit, but he didn’t suffer from not being kitted out in his tried and tested apparel. Indeed, as he jousted with Evenepoel through the midpoint of the course, it briefly looked as though he might emulate Tony Rominger in 1993 and claim a time trial win in the king of the mountains jersey.

“I was expecting a fight with myself today,” Pogačar said. “After not the greatest feeling in the Dauphiné in the time trial. I pulled it off today above my expectations. In the end, I think I was quite close to Remco, maybe 16 seconds, so not that much. I’m super happy to be so close to the best time triallist in the world.”

The best time triallist in the world is now the man closest to Pogačar in the overall standings, but it seems clear that Vingegaard – even with his early deficit – remains the Slovenian’s foremost preoccupation, despite his protestations.

“I have always eyes on everybody, not just one guy,” Pogačar said in his post-race press conference. “I said already before in the mixed zone, you cannot discount all the GC riders or the top 10 in general. 

“You have them in the mind, you look at them. But in the end, of course, Jonas is going to try the most, I think. He’s the most hungry, I think, to gain back time. He’s in super good shape. His team’s in really good form and they will try tomorrow or the next days. But I don’t just watch one guy. I focus on everybody and mostly on myself.”

There is punchy terrain to come in the days ahead, and Visma | Lease a Bike will surely probe. The trouble is, they already did that in Rouen on stage 4, and Pogačar ended up winning the day.

“This year the parcours is designed to be really hectic, so you need to be careful," he said. "Every stage has been either nervous or super hard, and I think tomorrow and the next day is the same. It was important to take yellow, but the most important is to have it in Paris.”