The Tour de France again produced a duel between Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar, though few could have anticipated the gap that would ultimately form between the two outstanding favourites in the final week.
Then again, perhaps a race as attritional as this one was always likely to take a toll. Peter Sagan was riding his final Tour de France and he suggested he had never competed in one as intense as this, with only two days where the racing wasn’t full-throated from the very outset.
