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There is always a sense of phoney war in the run-in to the Tour de France’s first stage in the high mountains, and at least one debate of the opening 10 days of this year’s race fits that context to a T. Has Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike team at times been towing the bunch deliberately in order to ensure that Tadej Pogacar retains the yellow jersey? It’s a gloriously arcane question, the kind that only comes up in the Tour’s opening phase, but it distracts from a point that could be key in the next 10 days: how the two teams manage the race will probably be decisive.
Firstly, a brief explainer. The received wisdom in cycling lore is that holding the yellow jersey early in a Grand Tour can be as much a curse as a blessing, because the daily media and podium duties cut into recovery time. Hence the thinking goes that Visma might have been chasing down the odd move purposely to keep Pogacar in the maillot jaune, so that he will be answering media questions and hanging about waiting to go on the podium, while Vingegaard has his feet up. Only Visma’s management know if this was the case, but what is certain is that the febrile atmosphere between the two teams will intensify from here on in.
In that context, Monday’s slog through the Massif Central was a score draw between the two armadas. Pogacar could afford to lose yellow to Ben Healy of Ireland as it buys his UAE team some down time at least on Wednesday and Thursday, when Healy’s EF squad will have to control the race. On the other hand, Simon Yates’s opportunistic stage win on Monday redressed the balance a little in favour of Visma; at this stage of the Tour, any amount of positive momentum is welcome.
The tone had been set for the opening 10 days – and possibly the whole Tour – about 15km from the finish of the first stage into Lille on 5 July when Vingegaard and his lieutenants Matteo Jorgenson and Edoardo Affini surged to the front of the peloton in a cross wind and split the race. Pogacar was not to be caught out, but only one of his men made the split of about 40; Vingegaard, on the other hand, had three with him.
Visma have no option but to try to find openings, to probe UAE’s defences constantly to seek the single chink in the armour that may enable their leader to pull back some of his 1min 17sec deficit to Pogacar. Hence an abortive attempt to split the field on Sunday into Châteauroux led by Wout van Aert, and Monday’s classic display of tactical mountain racing, with Yates and the Belgian Victor Campenaerts sent ahead in a breakaway just in case either Vingegaard or Jorgenson managed to elude Pogacar and his men.
This kind of racing has paid massive dividends for the Dutch squad in the past, most recently at the Giro d’Italia, where Yates managed an unlikely overall victory with the support of Van Aert, at the expense of UAE’s starlet Isaac del Toro. The scenario that is the stuff of nightmares for the UAE management is the one that Visma (in their previous incarnation as Jumbo-Visma) engineered in 2022, when UAE were first reduced in numbers by illness, and were then put to the sword by Vingegaard, Van Aert and Primoz Roglic in the Alps.
Roglic has moved on, but Jorgenson is an adequate replacement; he has twice won the Paris-Nice stage race and finished eighth in the Tour last year while supporting Vingegaard. The obvious tactic for Visma in the next 10 days will be to burn off Pogacar’s support riders to engineer a situation in which the Slovenian ends up on his own on a mountain with Jorgenson and Vingegaard, who can attack him one by one. Pogacar may well prove equal to the task, but there is only one way to find out. Any one of the four high mountain stages in the Alps and Pyrenees would be adequate, and they only need Pogacar to flinch once.
Nerves will have been sharpened by João Almeida’s heavy crash on Friday en route to Mûr-de-Bretagne, which forced him to quit the race on Sunday. With Rafal Majka sitting out this Tour, that has deprived the double Tour winner of his principal mountain wingman. Almeida – “the best teammate in the world,” as Pogacar put it – would have provided substantial support: he has notched up nine wins this year, including the Tour of Switzerland.
“Someone will have to step in,” said the UAE director of sport, Simone Pedrazzini, but the uncomfortable fact is that Almeida offered a back-up option, a man who could mark a breakaway and potentially work towards finishing on the podium. Neither Adam Yates or Jhonatan Narváez is a like-for-like replacement, while another UAE climber, Pavel Sivakov, looked distinctly out of sorts on Sunday and Monday. UAE will need him to recover during Tuesday’s rest day.
There are questions around Visma as well. Yates’s stage win on Monday suggests he is back to top form after his struggles on the opening stage, but thus far Van Aert has blown hot and cold, completely absent at times, shy of his best at others, but capable of finishing second to Jonathan Milan on Saturday into Laval. It remains to be seen if he is merely riding himself in having taken a break after the Giro.
In past Tours, he has proven capable of smashing the entire race into smithereens on any mountain stage, and if Visma are hoping to take the fight to UAE in the next 10 days, they need him to quickly rediscover that same blistering form.
