There is no stopping Tadej Pogacar. The Giro d’Italia winner took a definitive and conclusive grip on the yellow jersey with just two stages of the Tour de France remaining after another solo win, on stage 19 to Isola 2000.
It was too much for the defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard, who finally conceded defeat after crossing the line at the high-altitude ski station. “Now it’s over,” the Dane said.
In yet another display of daunting strength, Pogacar, of the UAE Emirates team, crushed his closest rivals Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel in the high passes of the Mercantour Alps. It was the Slovenian’s 10th Grand Tour stage win of 2024.
This was payback for Pogacar, for the humiliations he has endured at the hands of Vingegaard and his team. Dropped in the Alps by Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023, the 25-year-old exacted brutal revenge, increasing his lead on his rival to just over five minutes with two days left to race.
Just to rub salt in the wound, Pogacar also denied the Dane’s Visma Lease-a-bike teammate, Matteo Jorgenson, a debut Tour stage win, catching the American rider almost within sight of the finish line.
Much had been made of Pogacar’s supposed vulnerability at high altitude, but not only did the 2020 and 2021 Tour champion survive the thin air of the race’s highest peak, the Cime de la Bonette, he cruised further ahead in the overall standings and again emphasised his superiority over the peloton.
On the final climb to Isola 2000 a faltering Vingegaard morphed from champion to limpet, sticking doggedly to Evenepoel’s back wheel, but unable to assist in the pursuit of Pogacar, after the race leader had attacked nine kilometres from the finish.
“Maybe something is catching up now,” Vingegaard, whose Tour buildup was derailed by a serious crash that hospitalised him in April, said after the stage. “I think it’s normal with only one and a half months of preparation. I said, from the start, it would be crazy if I could fight with one and a half months [of preparation], but I did it for two and a half weeks.”
For Vingegaard, the walnut whip of the towering 2,802m Cime de la Bonette, the high point of the Tour and what was expected to provide the platform for a fightback, became a road to nowhere. What had been expected to be a high-altitude “death zone”, a platform to test Pogacar’s capabilities, with a fiery attack from the reigning champion, did not materialise.
With two of his teammates, Jorgenson and Wilco Kelderman, in the six-man breakaway, the scene was set for the Dane to make his move, but nothing transpired. Instead, his legs were simply not strong enough.
On the hoof, his team played a second card, that of a Jorgenson stage win. But showing an insatiable appetite for success, Pogacar thwarted that plan too. “I wasn’t on a good day,” Vingegaard told the media after the stage. “I had to switch my mindset from trying to go for the win.”
Even with a summit finish and time trial still to race, the Tour is now won. But Pogacar has been also been warned by two former Grand Tour champions, one stripped of his accolades, the other with his public image still intact, over displaying arrogance.
In the aftermath of the Slovenian’s surprise attack on the Col du Noyer on Wednesday, Pogacar was reprimanded by none other than Lance Armstrong.
“It was really unnecessary to attack like that,” Armstrong said on his podcast. “This will only draw more attention to Pogacar. If there’s already speculation about his performance, this certainly doesn’t help.”
That view was supported by former Giro d’Italia champion, Tom Dumoulin, speaking to the Dutch broadcaster NOS.
“Pogacar didn’t need to do this at all. He did it solely to unsettle Vingegaard,” Dumoulin said, latching on to other growing suggestions of arrogance in the French media.
“There’s definitely an element of arrogance. The rivalry between Vingegaard and Pogacar has spanned three years, and Pogacar can’t accept being beaten two years in a row. Now that he’s back in control and has the strength to challenge Vingegaard again, he’s thinking, ‘Now, I’ll get you back.’”
