When Diego Maradona scored the goal of the century against England at the 1986 World Cup, the dizzying magic of the moment was happily encased forever in the immortal words of radio commentator Victor Hugo Morales, who cried out: “Cosmic kite, what planet did you come from?!”
To evoke the extraterrestrial in football is to offer the sincerest form of praise, but at the Tour de France, the same metaphor carries a very different connotation. The headline on the front page of L’Équipe on Wednesday morning hardly read like a ringing endorsement of Jonas Vingegaard’s probity: “From another planet.”
Vingegaard’s stunning dominance in the Combloux time trial on stage 16 had seen the Jumbo-Visma rider put some 1:38 into Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and place a hefty down payment on final overall victory. It also moved L’Équipe to dust off the kind of language employed on page one when Lance Armstrong stunned the Tour at Sestriere in 1999, a result since excised from the record books.
On Wednesday afternoon, Vingegaard seemed to move to a place beyond all adjectives when he delivered another chilling show of strength on the Col de la Loze, putting the maillot jaune firmly and definitively beyond the reach of Pogačar and anybody else.
Vingegaard began his onslaught on the upper reaches of the Col de la Loze shortly after Pogačar had begun to flag 8km or so from the summit, and he continued at a remorseless pace all the way to the top. Whatever about another planet, Vingegaard certainly looked to be competing in a completely different race to everybody else on the road to Courchevel.
The Dane reached the finish fourth on the stage, 1:52 down on early escapee Felix Gall (AG2R Citroën), but almost two minutes ahead of Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates), and just shy of six minutes clear of Pogačar. In the overall standings, Vingegaard is now 7:35 up on Pogačar and more than 10 minutes clear of everybody else. Time gaps from another century.
At the weekend, Vingegaard had told reporters that he could “understand” why the extremely high levels of performance at this Tour had been greeted with scepticism given the history of doping in the sport. In Courchevel on Wednesday evening, Vingegaard was asked what he and his Jumbo-Visma team could do the allay the suspicions that such outsized performances inevitably generate.
“For me, it’s hard to tell what more you can say,” Vingegaard said. “I guess, I understand that it’s hard to trust…
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