Despite leading the biggest race in the world, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) has cut a fairly nonchalant figure in the daily Tour de France press conferences, and it was no different on the rest day.
The Slovenian has reason to be relaxed – he won two stages in the Pyrenees and now leads the race overall by over four minutes – but he is, as ever, also keen to not overstate his position or play the arrogant leader.
His perennial rival and current second-placed Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) was clear on the morning of the rest day that he still thinks he can win the Tour, and Pogačar was clear that he has not written the Dane off either.
“I’m pretty confident in myself, I mean, I have to be,” he said, speaking to the media on Monday afternoon. “But I’m also pretty sure that Jonas can be confident as well, because he’s in really good shape, like we saw in the TT and the day after in Superbagnères, he was really flying.
“I need to keep focused, I need to keep eating well, sleeping well, and keep this mood that we have in this group, keep up the motivation, and be confident for the last week, because I think it’s going to be tough, but we are ready for a fight with everybody, especially with Jonas.”
Although Pogačar has won four stages and came out of the two of the hardest days on stages 13 and 14 with an improved lead, there is still a lot of climbing to come in the third week as the race heads to Mont Ventoux and the Alps.
Headlining the climbing challenges will be Mont Ventoux on Tuesday and Col de la Loze on stage 18, which – not coincidentally, Pogačar thinks – are two sites of Vingegaard beating him in the past.
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“Obviously, this year, the parcours was… I’m almost confident to say that it was designed to give me a bit of scaredness, because we’ve been to Hautacam and we are going to Mont Ventoux and Col de la Loze, where Jonas dropped me all three times,” he said with some humour.
“But I always look at it as a race situation, it’s not about the climb that it suits better or worse or whatever, it’s just the race situation and how the race is going. Because I think all the climbs are more or less the same. Ten, fifteen-kilometre climbs, if they are fifteen kilometres at 10% it’s just stats and it’s not about what name it carries.”
Pogačar doesn’t need to take any more time to win this race, nor is he looking to avenge those bad memories from 2021 and 2023, but it seems unlikely that he won’t want to win when the race visits those famous ascents.
“I actually like all these climbs, I like Mont Ventoux, it’s super iconic, and Col de la Loze is one of the hardest climbs I’ve ever done in my career, so I’m looking forward to these two stages,” he said. “I will not say that I’m looking for revenge or something, I just want to have better legs than those two days in the past. That’s all, I’m looking forward to it.”
Even as he looks to be riding towards his fourth Tour de France title, the dominant Pogačar was still trying to be humble ahead of the third week, reflecting on how he has grown into the leader of the peloton, and reiterating how he isn’t just cruising towards the win.
“I’m out of the white jersey, I’ve been in the white jersey for so long, and now I actually miss this jersey,” he joked.
“But on the other hand, for sure I have more experience of the whole Tour, of how the race is going, what my capability is, what the competition is, what they can do. I think I am maturing and just growing up.
“It’s my sixth Tour, always on a high level, and I think I can be confident now to say I have some experience in the Tour, but still not all of them. We are learning every week, every day of the Tour. We’ll see how far we can actually go.”
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