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Tadej Pogacčar routinely travels to places nobody else can reach, but at last year’s Tour de France, he always seemed to have company on journeys he would rather have taken alone. He attacked every which way last July, but he never once succeeded in shaking Jonas Vingegaard loose.
All sorts of explanations were touted for Pogačar’s struggles on the pivotal day on the Col du Granon – the heat, his depleted team, the altitude – but as the race drew on, it became increasingly apparent that the real problem was Vingegaard himself. For the first time in his short career, Pogacar had come up against someone who had his number.
Although Pogačar ended 2022 with resounding victory in his next meeting with Vingegaard at Il Lombardia, he will have spent the winter still harbouring doubts about his ability to wrest the Tour title back from the Dane. Even on the 2021 Tour, after all, once Pogačar had effectively sealed the race on the first two days in the Alps, he was never able to drop Vingegaard again, and he was even distanced on Mont Ventoux.
The stalemate continued during their game of correspondence chess last month, played from opposite ends of Spain. In Andalusia, Pogačar’s aggression dominated Jaén Paraiso Interior and the Ruta del Sol. In Galicia a week later, Vingegaard countered with a hat-trick of stage wins and an overall victory at O Gran Camiño.
The results were similar, but the style was subtly different, as Philippa York noted in her cogent preview of Paris-Nice last week. While Vingegaard was content to limit himself to finishing off his Jumbo-Visma team’s work in the finale, Pogačar seemed to be straining to put together a magnum opus every time he pinned on a number.
“I get the feeling there’s a certain amount of reassurance going on here,” she wrote of Pogačar. “He needs to know he’s still number one, still the reference and convince himself and everyone else that he only lost the Tour last year because of tactical errors.”
In that light, stage 4 of Paris-Nice to La Loge des Gardes served an important purpose for Pogačar. Stage victory at the summit also yielded the yellow jersey, but one senses the day’s real prize was the reassurance Pogačar garnered from the rare pleasure of dropping Vingegaard on a climb. Yes, it can be done.
And, despite everything he has achieved to this point, it’s possible that Pogačar needed the win here far more than his rival did. If he had come up short against Vingegaard on…
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