After nine days of racing at this year’s Tour de France, Tadej Pogačar of UAE Team Emirates is still decisively in the yellow jersey. His margin of 33 seconds over Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) might not be a race-winning margin - a Tour hasn’t been won by less since 2007 - but it does mean he is in control of the race.
The reasons for this are clear: there have been few stages with gaps on general classification so far, just stage four in the Alps and the stage seven time trial. On stage nine, the gravel day, things threatened to be blown apart, but in the end, there was no change.
It has created a kind of Phoney War, a détente, between the main men on general classification - Pogačar, Evenepoel, Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), who is at 1:15, and Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), who is at 1:36.
Into this vacuum of actual time splits, or any hard evidence to go off - something unlikely to come on Tuesday too - a war of words has entered. Being short of action, the GC men have taken to mind games. It’s predictable and entertaining, but also rather pointless.
The main bone of contention seems to come from Sunday’s gravel stage, where Roglič was distanced, and some work between the might of Pogačar, Evenepoel and Vingegaard might have put the Red Bull rider out of the race.
Whether it actually would have amounted to anything is a bit of an alternative history, a counterfactual, something we will never actually know. Still, it seemed to have annoyed Pogačar and Evenepoel that the defending champion did not want to work with them.
"I think Tadej and I were not happy with it because maybe the whole Tour could have been decided today," Evenepoel said on Sunday.
"We have to accept race tactics and race situations, but sometimes you also need the balls to race, and unfortunately maybe Jonas didn't have them today. But it's no problem – the race is still very long, and I totally accept the reasons why he didn't pull, why he didn't race.”
Not the most contentious, sure, with Evenepoel actually sounding more magnanimous than the headlines would have you believe. But put to Vingegaard, the quotes got a response.
"We were mainly focused on not losing time," Vingegaard said at his press conference on Monday. "If I had gone with those two and they had left me behind on that sector where I had to let Pogačar ride a bit later, I would have lost the Tour yesterday. It wasn't a lack of ‘balls’, I just rode smart.”
It’s true, the Dane is very good at riding smart. His victories at the last two Tours have been through a game of patience, of waiting for Pogačar - his biggest rival - to keep attacking, and then, eventually, blow up. There’s nothing to say this couldn’t happen again.
His ride on stage nine makes sense in this context, as Evenepoel acknowledged. There are still 12 stages to go, with most of the big mountain days to come, and this is where the difference will be made. Gravel isn’t Vingegaard’s specialty, and it’s more of a triumph to not lose time there than to bury Roglič. It doesn’t really come down to possessing "balls" or not, this isn’t machismo, this is just tactics.
"No, I’m not afraid of him," Pogačar said of Vingegaard at his own press conference. "I would say yesterday I was more afraid of Remco because he was really flying, but I’m not afraid of anyone. I just need to have a good day every day, like I’ve had so far.
"I think yesterday I could see [that] Visma was afraid of me… I think he is a little bit afraid, but we will see on the climbs how it’s going to go."
If there is anyone Pogačar should be scared of, it’s Vingegaard and Visma, who have found a way to force him into blowing up in the last two Tours. Of course, both are in different places now, and Pogačar seems to be in world-class form, but perhaps more thought needs to go to this, rather than worrying about whether Vingegaard has "balls".
Olympic selection oddities
With the peloton so small for the road races at the Olympic Games, some odd decisions have had to be made. We already knew that there would be no defending champion in the men’s race, with Jhonathan Narvaéz preferred over Richard Carapaz by Ecuador. Even more intriguingly, though, Slovenia have chosen Ursa Pintar and Eugenia Bujak over Urška Žigart, with the latter being the national champion. With so few spots on offer, there seems to be more to selection than just form. Everything is political, after all.
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If you want to get in touch with Adam, email adam.becket@futurenet.com.
