There is a good reason why Sunday will be the first time the Tour de France has finished with a time trial in 35 years. The 1989 race closed with the ultimate cliffhanger on the Champs-Élysées, with Greg LeMond starting as the underdog, and ousting Laurent Fignon of France by eight seconds, the tightest winning margin the great race has witnessed.
In subsequent years, organisers feared that any attempt to repeat the stage would be doomed in comparison with what that race produced, hence they persisted with the tried and tested format of a road race stage finishing with a circuit race up and down the Champs-Élysées.
The move to a Nice finish to avoid Paris during its Olympic buildup offered the opportunity to break with tradition, but even so there seems little chance of a repeat of the 1989 finale. With Tadej Pogacar poised to take his third career Tour de France after dominating Friday’s mountain stage through the southern Alps for his fourth stage win, there is a strong chance that the 33.7km between Monaco and Nice will be a coronation march rather than a dramatic reversal of fortune like the one that resulted in Pogacar’s first Tour win in 2020.
Zoom out from what Sunday’s time trial means in the context of the past three weeks’ racing to observe the bigger picture and that coronation march has plenty of glitz and bling. Pogacar is set to become the seventh to achieve the elusive double of Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in one year, joining Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Stephen Roche, Miguel Induráin and Marco Pantani. It is a monumental feat, one many observers felt was impossible in the modern era.
Winning a single Grand Tour is difficult enough physically and mentally, but attempting to win a pair of them back to back has become much harder since the calendar changed in 1995, spreading the Giro, Tour and Vuelta out more evenly across the season, with a five‑week break between the Giro and Tour rather than the previous two to three weeks. The ballpark figure for a male cyclist to hold his best form is usually held to be about six weeks, which meant the plan would be to ride into form during the Giro, back off before the Tour, then hope the form did not fade in the final week of the Tour.
That was a daunting enough proposition, but now, with the Giro and Tour spread over three months, coaches have become increasingly dubious about the possibility of winning both because of the need to achieve two peaks of form in such a short time. Moreover, the overwhelming importance that the Tour has attained in the cycling calendar in the past 30 years means that, in the vast majority of cases, the exclusive group who feel they might be capable of winning in France dare not take the risk of compromising that key objective by trying to take the Giro earlier in the same season.
Pogacar has bucked that trend partly because, with two Tour wins under his belt, he could afford to take the risk of flopping in the Tour, but also because, at the point when he decided to race this year’s Giro, the working assumption was that Jonas Vingegaard would be more than his match in the Tour, as he had been in 2022 and 2023, making the Giro a worthy alternative target.
On Sunday evening, Pogacar may reflect that he has, like all his predecessors, ridden his luck in taking that Grand Tour double. Run a sliding door across this season and on one side you are bound to find 4 April and a sweeping right-hand bend on the descent from the Alto de Olaeta about 40km from the finish of stage four of the Tour of the Basque Country.
A horrific crash into a concrete drainage ditch put Vingegaard and Evenepoel in hospital, drastically affecting the preparation of Pogacar’s two biggest rivals for the Tour. Had the duo – and Primoz Roglic – all negotiated that bend in safety and enjoyed a trouble-free run-in to the Tour, the past three weeks might have been very different.
The double should open another door for Pogacar, to an even more elusive target: a potential triple crown of Giro, Tour and world road race championship, achieved by Merckx (1974) and Roche (1987) in men’s racing, and Annemiek van Vleuten in women’s racing, in 2022.
The 2024 title will be contested in Zurich at the end of September and, with its heavy quotient of climbing, is viewed as eminently suited to Pogacar, who took the bronze medal last year in Glasgow on a technical circuit that was more suitable for the eventual winner, Mathieu van der Poel. If the Slovenian races he will be heavily marked, but that has not fazed him in most races in recent years.
