“Can I have some water please? I don’t just always drink Red Bull now,” Primož Roglič asked his press staff, with a quiet grin to show he was joking about his Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team’s latest sponsor. And that was just one of the several moments of gentle humour in a Tour de France rest day press conference where reading the key protagonist’s underlying mood music was, to say the least, not straightforward.
On the plus side, Roglič is currently running fourth overall at 1:36. That’s the worst position of all the top four pre-race favourites, his detractors will point out. But on the other hand, it also means the Slovenian star is in his best position overall on a first Tour rest day since he was in yellow on stage 9 back in 2020, coming out of the Pyrenees.
In 2021, at the same point in the Tour, the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader was already home, having abandoned due to multiple bad crashes in the first tumultuous week through the hills of Brittany. In 2022, he’d already come down heavily in a bad crash on the cobbles of Roubaix and was nursing several injuries, prior to a post-Alps abandon. As for 2023, Roglic wasn’t even in the race, opting instead for the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España.
Instead this year on the Tour’s first rest day, it was Roglič’s teammate Aleksandr Vlasov who had to quit because of a diagnosed broken ankle from a bad fall on stage 9. And Roglič, so far unscathed himself but surely more mindful than some of just how tough it is for a rider to have to quit cycling’s biggest bike race early through injuries, used his opening press conference words to pay Vlasov fulsome tribute.
“He’s a big help in the mountains, and it’s a big loss for our team,” Roglič said. “He’s shown how strong he was in all the races we did together, but in the end these are the facts. We can’t change those, it is how it is.”
At the same time, given “the speed that he crashed at and how his bike looked, he can be quite happy with just having a broken ankle, it could have been a lot worse. So we have to take the positives from this".
Roglič was equally determined to look on the bright side of the first week of racing regarding himself, too, replying to one journalist’s enquiry on his current state of form as being “good, actually. It’s been a long time felt so good in the first rest day of the Tour".
“It was an intense start, definitely. We lost some time in Bologna, a bit more in the Galibier, some more in the TT, but that’s a part of racing.
“Of course I always want to be in the front. But even when you are in front and leading and have one minute [time gap] or whatever it is on the rest, it is still not enough.
“So at the moment I still just want to keep on the right track, get through the race and get into the final.”
It’s true that some GC contenders like Simon Yates (Jayco-AIUIa) are in a far worse position, time-wise, than Roglič. Yet there was no getting away from the fact, either, that on the gravel stage on Sunday no matter what the combination of the ‘Big Four’ riders were attacking - and there were plenty of them - Roglič was never amongst their number.
In fact, barring the time trial where he was briefly atop the leader’s board and managed to take three seconds on Vingegaard, to date in the Tour, Roglič has not been a high-profile GC player at all. Hence, perhaps, the mixed messages of his press conference.
When asked about how he felt he could redress the situation and regain the upper hand on his rivals, Roglič appeared keen to lower any potential sense of tension and simultaneously underline the fact he was playing a long game.
“When they ride a bit slower, I’ll have a bit more of an option, but as long as they ride so hard and fast, they will be harder to beat,” he said with his classic deadpan Roglič humour, before adding helpfully,
“Let’s wait and see, it’s still the first week, there are still two weeks to go.” As for what the key to success in the decisive third week could be, Roglič flipped that particular query back with a laconic response of: “Have the strongest legs, eh?”
The question as to whether he was concerned about the potential dangers of the descents in this year’s Tour brought a similarly humorous response about the challenges he’d faced of another kind.
“At the moment I’m quite confident going downhill, also I enjoy it. I have a lot more problems going uphill rather than downhill, if I’m honest,” he concluded with a smile.
More question marks
The afternoon’s news of Roglič’s non-selection for the Olympic Games, despite being defending TT champion, had yet to emerge when the rest day press conference took place. But no matter what now happens to Roglič in August - and he was non-commital, to say the least, about whether he’d try for a record-equalling fourth win in the Vuelta a España, which starts on the 18th of next month - the Slovenian’s understated performance in the here and now of the Tour is currently under severe scrutiny.
In fact, it has already sparked speculation that he might now be fighting for the podium in Nice rather than outright victory.
However, in a reminder of the quiet but steely determination that always characterized him, Roglič pushed back firmly against that particular idea. Regardless of what his target is on GC, he argued that his attitude of doing as well as possible remained the same.
“You always still need to be there with the best ones, you cannot afford to say - now I’ll lose 10 minutes and then get it back.”
Be it first place, second, or 10th place that is the goal. “If I do my best, and the team too, then we can all look at ourselves in the mirror and be happy. Because that´s something we can manage and something we can do.”
But when it comes to what Roglič might be finally able to achieve in this year’s Tour from this point onwards, at the moment the image in the mirror seems blurrily uncertain - and his rest day press conference did precious little to clear away the question marks, either.
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