It’s the first rest day of the Tour de France and no one is surprised that Tadej Pogačar is in yellow. After all, he came into the race as the favourite. With a star-studded UAE Emirates team massed around him and with the other members of the ‘Big Four’ club – Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel, Primož Roglič – all suffering from less-than-optimal preparation, the two-time Tour winner looked likely to follow the Giro d’Italia script of blowing away the opposition.
In an ideal world, after emerging from the dusty tracks around Troyes, Pogačar would have enforced his will on the peloton and all there’d have been left to speculate would be who was going to occupy the remaining podium places. That hasn’t happened, and I doubt there’s too much surprise in the UAE camp because, as Tom Pidcock observed, the level is so high at the Tour de France.
