“For sure they’re picking one stage,” said the yellow jersey of how he thinks Jonas Vingegaard and his team will approach the Tour de France’s final week.
After he successfully defended – and indeed grew – his Tour de France lead in the Pyrenees, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) expects Jonas Vingegaard and Visma-Lease a Bike to attempt another assault in the Alpine stages to come in the Tour’s final week.
The race leader will be ready.
“For sure they will try,” Pogačar said in a press conference on the Tour’s second rest day. “Jonas said yesterday that he’s not giving up on the fight and I think that’s correct what he said, and it’s going to be a tough final weekend. We’re going to see a lot of fireworks for sure from everybody.”
Monday gave the Tour peloton a much-deserved chance to relax after two days in the Pyrenees with big GC implications. Pogačar put in a hard attack to drop his rivals on stage 14 and then soloed to victory and a healthy gap on the Pla d’Adet. The following day, Visma put Matteo Jorgenson to work setting a hard pace on the Plateau de Beille with an eye towards landing a decisive counterpunch on Pogačar – but the Slovenian put Vingegaard in the rearview mirror again and took his second straight stage victory at the line. He now has a GC lead of 3:09 on Vingegaard’s second place.
The looming final week will culminate in three stages likely to have GC implications, with three high-altitude climbs finishing at the Isola ski station on stage 19, and four major ascents on stage 20 near Nice before the race ends on stage 21 in a time trial. Based on what he has seen so far, Pogačar anticipates Visma will launch a final assault on the GC leaderboard on one of the two mass-start days.
“For sure they’re picking one stage,” Pogačar said. “I don’t think they picking both stages Friday and Saturday. I think they will focus on one, but yeah, we will try to do our own race, try to defend, and that plays so that they cannot do anything crazy.”
Unfortunately for Visma, Pogačar seems quite excited to tackle the specific climbs on the docket for the last few stages of the Tour. As if having a GC lead, impeccable form, and teammates like João Almeida and Adam Yates weren’t enough reason for Pogačar to be looking forward to what’s to come, the roads where stages 19 and 20 will be decided are already very familiar to him.
“I love the Col de la Bonette. It’s a super beautiful climb,” he said of the stage 19 route over the highest pass in Europe (2,798 meters). “I did it the first time last year in August and I enjoyed it. It’s a super nice climb. I love those passes in Alps, and then a long downhill towards Isola where we were training before the Tour. The Isola climb is also super good, similar to the Plateau de Beille, I think.
“And then the stage on Saturday is almost my home stage. I would say that it is my home stage,” said Pogačar, who lives in nearby Monaco. “I train a lot of on those climbs. I know it really well and I’m looking forward to start there this weekend.”
Given how well this past weekend went and how much he enjoys riding his bike on the coming terrain, it should probably come as no surprise that Pogačar was feeling (cautiously) confident with only one week left in his pursuit of a third career Tour victory. Asked what it was about the final week of the Tour that he feared most, with “being ill” as a suggested possibility, Pogačar – who said just before the Tour he had COVID-19 only a couple of weeks prior – could not come up with anything else that gave him reason to be afraid.
“I don’t know what I fear most from the last week. I don’t think I fear anything,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to the last week. Six more stages to go, finishing with a nice time trial, a really hard time trial. Of course you don’t want to get sick or ill or anything in the last week, so yeah, let’s try to keep away from that if we can. In the bunch a lot of COVID is going around and a lot of illness, and also on the climbs, when people are so close to you is hard to prevent, but yeah, let’s cross the fingers that I arrive fresh, not sick or ill for the final weekend.”
If he can manage to achieve that goal of staying healthy through to the final weekend, Pogačar and his big GC lead will be hard to overhaul even on those tough Alpine stages to come. Thus far in the Tour, Vingegaard has only put time into him by getting bonus seconds at the stage 11 finish, and when all the bonuses were accounted for on that day, Vingegaard only netted a single second on GC. Every other time gap has gone in Pogačar’s favor so far. In other words, it will take a seismic shift in the state of affairs for Vingegaard to truly threaten Pogačar’s lead.
Still, far stranger things have happened, and it was only a year ago that Vingegaard put nearly six minutes into Pogačar on a single day in the Alps, stage 17 of last year’s Tour. Even with Pogačar now heavily favored to win, nothing is certain yet at the 2024 Tour.
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