“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.
