The yellow and black jerseys were swarmed at the head of the peloton all day. Jumbo-Visma’s efforts extinguished any hope of the early break going the distance on stage 14 of the Tour de France and they also seemed to tease a grand offensive from maillot jaune Jonas Vingegaard. Instead, at day’s end, the race remained as deadlocked as ever.
Vingegaard’s sharpness atop the Col de Joux Plane – where two motorbikes had already blocked an acceleration from Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) – saw him beat the Slovenian to the bonus sprint at the summit. Pogačar, however, returned the favour when the pair sprinted for second place behind Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos) in Morzine.
All told, Jumbo-Visma’s stage-long toil saw Vingegaard add just one second to his advantage, extending his slender lead over Pogačar to 10 seconds. The intention, one imagines, was to move the dial a little more than that but Vingegaard’s teammates declared themselves satisfied with their day’s work as they began to arrive one by one at the Jumbo-Visma bus.
Sepp Kuss, as ever, was Vingegaard’s last man, guiding the Dane most of the way up the Col de Joux Plane until Pogačar’s lieutenant Adam Yates splintered the front group with an attack that only the two favourites could follow. The idea behind Jumbo-Visma’s persistent pace-making, it seems, was to try to draw the sting from Pogačar’s acceleration and play to Vingegaard’s powers of endurance.
“We rode the race like we wanted to,” Kuss said as he warmed down outside the bus. “A lot of teams were asking what we were doing, riding with the breakaway there at 20 seconds in front the whole time, but we wanted to ride our rhythm, make it a tough day and then try on the last climb. We have no regrets, we gave it everything. Jonas is really strong, but Pogačar is right there with him. It’s still a huge battle.”
When Pogačar accelerated viciously 3.7km from the summit, it briefly looked as though the Slovenian might divest Vingegaard of yellow, but the Dane never lost him from sight and clawed back onto his wheel inside the final 2km of the ascent. There were shades of Contador and Schleck on the upper reaches of the climb, where the pair slowed and eyed one another ahead of the motorbike-interrupted bonus sprint. Once more, there was precious little to separate them.
“Ideally, you want a beautiful solo victory, but it’s good that he came up to Pogačar and could get the bonus seconds on the top,” Kuss…
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