It’s still all in the eye of the beholder. The duel between Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar was far too close to call before the 2023 Tour de France got underway and it remains stubbornly unresolved on the eve of the race’s entry into the Jura and Alps.
A mere 17 seconds separate Pogačar from Vingegaard’s yellow jersey after some 2,140 kilometres of racing. That narrow gap at this advanced point is hardly surprising given how little seemed to divide the two favourites in the build-up to the race, yet it’s a deceptive one too.
Despite the tight margins, this race has been anything but deadlocked, with Vingegaard and Pogačar each enjoying moments of supremacy in the opening week. The defending champion threatened to turn the race into an exhibition with his show of force on the Col de Marie Blanque, only for Pogačar to balance the books somewhat with his clear win at Cauterets the following afternoon.
Pogačar clawed back another eight seconds on Vingegaard with his acceleration on the Puy de Dôme on stage 9, but both men and their entourages came away from the volcano unbowed. In the UAE Team Emirates camp, Pogačar’s performance was another obvious confirmation of his forward momentum, yet over at Jumbo-Visma, Vingegaard’s damage-limitation exercise was still couched as a success.
“In cycling you always look to the result and how you do compared to the others, but you also have to look to your own performances,” Jumbo-Visma directeur sportif Merijn Zeeman told Cyclingnews in Roanne on Thursday. “You cannot do better than being your best self and for sure Jonas was being his best self on the Puy de Dôme.
“We hadn’t expected to gain so much time on the Marie Blanque, and we hadn’t expected to lose time at Cauterets, but I think Puy de Dôme was something like what we were expecting, so it was a good day. Puy de Dôme proved that Pogačar is at an incredible level. He did his best-ever climbing performance, and it was the same for Jonas on a climb like that. For us, it was confirmation that Jonas is in very good shape.”
UAE Team Emirates sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez painted a similarly upbeat picture of Pogačar’s passage through the first half of the Tour, insisting that the concession of more than a minute to Vingegaard in Laruns on stage 5 had served to clarify rather than to discourage. Vingegaard, UAE established, had improved further on the level that carried him to overall victory a year ago.
“Before the…
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