Romain Bardet smiled as he answered during Monday’s rest day press conference. What else could he say? Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar occupy the top two places as this Tour de France enters the Pyrenees, and they have travelled to places nobody else could reach in the two weeks to this point.
“No, I don’t think so,” Bardet said when asked if he or any of the podium contenders could live with the top two in the mountains of this Tour. “We just hope they maybe look a bit at each other, because so far in the race, when they want to accelerate and make the decision, no one else can compete with them. It’s pretty hard.”
And yet Bardet has followed them further than most, and he has doggedly pieced together his finest Tour since he placed third overall after matching Chris Froome through the mountains in 2017. In May, illness forced the DSM rider to abandon a Giro d’Italia where he looked a potential winner, and he arrived at this Tour suggesting that hunting a stage win would be the summit of his ambition.
Instead, after two weeks of racing, Bardet lies fourth overall, 3:01 off Vingegaard’s yellow jersey but just 18 seconds shy of Geraint Thomas’ podium spot. He was a notable aggressor on the pivotal day to the Col du Granon, but his bid for stage victory on the final climb was drowned out by Vingegaard’s unmatchable effort on its upper reaches. He is unlikely to be afforded much more latitude in the Pyrenees.
“We’ve come a long way and made a big effort to be in such a good position. We wanted to leave all options open on the Tour and they are still open,” Bardet said. “Being this high up in the GC deprives me of opportunities to chase stages, like at Alpe d’Huez where I would have needed to be twenty minutes down overall to get in the breakaway. But I would still like to win a stage here à la pédale. Still, after a difficult beginning of the season, I’m happy to be where I am now.”
Bardet knows that he would have to rely on the providence of jours sans from both Vingegaard and Pogačar to overhaul them in the general classification. A podium place would appear the obvious glass ceiling in the final week of this Tour, even if he struck an optimistic note about escaping their attention to snare a stage win. Peyragudes features on stage 17, after all, and Bardet won there in 2017 after distancing Froome himself in the final kilometre.
“It’s a great memory, because I wasn’t super all day, but I found an opportunity in…
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