First it was Rouen, then it was the Mûr de Bretagne, and now it has been back-to-back victories in Hautacam and Peyragudes on Thursday: Tadej Pogačar has made it clear that for all he has racked up four wins in this year’s Tour de France and yellow is his top priority, he’s not going to sit back and let the rest of the stages be doled out amongst the opposition.
“I’m not here to make enemies, but this is the Tour de France,” Pogačar told reporters after he repeated his 2022 victory at Peyragudes against Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), albeit this time in a very different format of an uphill race against the clock, rather than a two-way sprint like three years ago.
“You cannot just back off if an opportunity for a stage win comes up. You never know when it will be your last day.”
“I will say, honestly, the team pays you to win, not to give them away.”
Pogačar’s latest triumph, his 21st Tour de France stage win and his tenth victory in the last two years, has now buttressed his lead to the point where he has a more than comfortable overall advantage of 4:13. That’s the kind of lead which often sparks debate about the wisdom of allowing breaks to go or simply grabbing all the victories on offer – and so it proved on Thursday.
Historically, the dilemma of whether to ‘divide and rule’ or not is the best policy is a discussion with deep roots in pro cycling. Back in the 1990s, when en route to five straight victories overall, Miguel Indurain and Banesto had an unwritten policy of all but giving away stage wins to their rivals, provided the yellow jersey was not threatened.
However, in the noughties, Lance Armstrong’s famous quote of ‘no gifts‘ after one Tour de France stage in 2004 echoed on long after his retirement, not to mention the subsequent loss of all his Tour victories from that era.
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20 years on, it appears, the jury is still out on that particular debate, but Pogačar’s take on it is clear and not just because taking victories is what is expected of him by his employers, either. Long-term, too, he explained, exactly how he was remembered in the peloton – at least when it came to gifting wins or not – was not something that was a top priority for him.
“I have a big team behind me who work every day of their careers for me to come to the Tour, and if I single-handedly decided to start giving away opportunities, the team would not be happy,” he said.
“So if there is an opportunity, I cannot say no to a stage in the Tour. In the end, when I finish my career, I will probably not speak to 99% of the peloton,” he added, “I will focus on friends and family.”
When it came to the stage win he had just taken, Pogačar said, the uphill time trial had been long marked down in his mind as a key reference point for his climbing performances in the Tour. Had he not managed, for whatever reason, to drop his rivals on the Hautacam, he explained, then a 10.4 kilometre uphill time trial would have given him a much more accurate reading of where he stood, climbing-wise, compared to his rivals.
As things turned out, it was clear even before the road began to steepen. By checkpoint 1 on the flat segment running alongside the lake in Loudenvielle, he was already marking the fastest time by five seconds on Evenepoel and eight seconds on Vingegaard.
From that point on, when the climbing for real started, the gap simply widened and widened, all the way to the finish. Unusually for a time trial, Pogačar crossed the line with a victory punch to the sky: an unspoken indication, perhaps, of how important the stage had been to him internally, let alone his team or the world in general.
“It’s my fourth win so far, but the big point of the Tour was today,” Pogačar explained.
“If I hadn’t made a gap yesterday, today I’d see the true climbing legs, and now we are in a situation where we can go stage by stage.
“We need to be in control, and we need to wake up every day feeling good. So the goal is to stay concentrated and try to keep the same gap, keep the yellow jersey.
“I’m not thinking about a particular stage win, although if there is an opportunity, we will go for it. But we need to be smart, too.”
The bandages from the injuries from Pogačar’s crash in Toulouse were plain to see on his arm during his press conference as well as the race itself on Friday, but the sense that the Slovenian is operating on another level in the Tour, just as he has been for much of the last 18 months, is also increasingly inescapable.
However, Pogačar played down the idea that he was, in fact, out of reach of the rest of his rivals, pointing out to reporters that in both 2022 and 2023, he had had bad moments and cracked and lost the Tour as a result. That, if nothing else, ensured he was keeping his feet on the ground.
“I had great Tours those years in some ways too, I got stage wins, and I got second overall. But there were moments in them where others could take time on me, too,” he reflected.
“So you never know whether this can be the Tour where I have a bad moment or others can have better days.
“I wouldn’t say I’m untouchable. I will try to be, but you never know.”
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