Another few grains of rice to tip the scales. Slowly but seemingly inexorably, Tadej Pogačar is inching towards Jonas Vingegaard’s yellow jersey at the Tour de France. The margins remain slender, but the Slovenian confirmed the direction of travel of the past week by clawing back another eight seconds atop the Grand Colombier on stage 13.
Much like at the Puy de Dôme last weekend, Pogačar had a touch more than Vingegaard once he unsheathed a sharp acceleration in the final 600m. Vingegaard didn’t bend, far less break, but he was simply unable to match Pogačar’s supersonic rhythm, conceding four seconds in real time plus another four in time bonuses.
History has shown that eight seconds can be all the difference in a race as tight as this one. The general classification in Paris will confirm the final value of the seconds won here, of course, but their psychological worth is already clear at this point.
“It’s not necessarily mental, it’s more about the legs,” UAE Team Emirates sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez insisted outside the team bus at the base of the climb in Culoz. “Taking some seconds is really good for us.”
In the overall standings, Pogačar is now just nine seconds off the maillot jaune but, perhaps as importantly, it was the third time in succession he has outlasted Vingegaard in a head-to-head at this race. At last year’s Tour, by contrast, Pogačar never once dropped Vingegaard despite the dizzying combinations of attacks he flung at the Dane in the Alps and Pyrenees.
Pogačar laid out his intentions for stage 13 from the outset, with his UAE Team Emirates squad driving the peloton for most of the afternoon and then sitting a blistering tempo on the 17km haul up the Grand Colombier. Although Michal Kwiatkowski (Ineos) held on from the early break to take the stage, Pogačar’s brutal late acceleration still carried him to third place and four bonus seconds.
“In the end, it was a successful day for us. We took a couple of seconds back. It was a good day for us,” Pogačar said. “Even if it was not a victory, it was a victory in the battle for yellow a little bit, so yeah, we can take for sure big confidence from today.”
Alps
Friday’s stage in the Jura marked the first in a trio of mountainous days that bring the curtain down on the second week, and there was always a sense that the first instalment was tailored more to Pogačar’s talents as a puncheur than to Vingegaard’s gifts of endurance. UAE Team Emirates certainly seemed to race with…
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