Another rest day in the yellow jersey and another carefully curated interaction with media at the Tour de France for Jonas Vingegaard. Like in Clermont-Ferrand a week ago, Jumbo-Visma again opted against making Vingegaard available for a press conference in Saint Gervais on Monday, preferring instead to release a short video interview with the Dane in the early evening.
Tadej Pogačar, who held his usual rest day press conference in mid-afternoon, might have pressed ahead in any notional contest for the Prix Orange [prize for the most likeable rider -ed] by now, but Vingegaard remains in front in their duel for the Tour itself, carrying a slender lead into the final week of the race.
After 2,606 kilometres of racing, only 10 seconds divide the two favourites, and there was precious little to separate them over three successive days in the mountains at the end of the second week. Pogačar snatched a handful of seconds on the Grand Colombier, Vingegaard snared a bonus on the Col de Joux Plane, and they broke even on the road to Saint Gervais-Mont Blanc on Sunday.
Speaking in the video interviews, recorded for Jumbo-Visma by Sporza and TV2, Vingegaard repeated his previous suggestion that the margin between the top two, whatever their final order, would be rather more emphatic by the time they reached Paris.
“It will be hard to tell. But I still think at one point, especially with the time trial and the stages coming up, I don’t believe it will be a matter of seconds,” Vingegaard said. “It could be less than a minute, for sure. But yeah, I don’t think it will be a matter of five seconds. I could not imagine. But I guess we’ll see in Paris.”
Of the six days remaining on this Tour, three stand out as the obvious places where Vingegaard and Pogačar’s duel will be won and lost, namely Tuesday’s stage 16 time trial to Combloux, the following day’s demanding Alpine leg over the Col de la Loze, and the potentially explosive run through the Vosges on the penultimate day.
“It’s only my third Tour de France, and for sure it’s been the hardest one so far,” said Vingegaard, who placed second behind Pogačar on his debut in 2021 before defeating the Slovenian a year ago. “It’s really hard to say now who’s going to win. It’s so close, it’s a really big fight.”
The 22.4km of time trialling from Passy to Combloux might offer a wider degree of separation in a contest that has been far too close to call to this point. The Tour’s lone time trial seems destined to take on…
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