Cauterets has hosted finishes of the Tour de France on a not-so-regular basis since the 1950s and the town has never been one to decide the race. In 1953, Louison Bobet was still nine days away from securing yellow, while 36 years later Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond were trading the race lead every few days.
The race’s last two visits – in 1995 and 2015 – saw Miguel Indurain and Chris Froome almost three minutes clear of anyone else at the top of the general classification. This time around, on the earliest visit to the Pyrenean peak, it’s still any Tour de France overall contender‘s game, so long as you’re named Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogačar.
The Tour de France’s all-too-brief and unusually early sojourn into the Pyrenees has concluded with two days of thrilling GC action centred around the duo. That’s what many of us would’ve long suspected heading into the race, though few would have predicted the circumstances and events of the two days.
On Wednesday the big question was ‘Is the Tour already over?’ as Vingegaard left his rival for dead on the Col de Marie Blanque, putting 1:04 into Pogačar. 24 hours later, the headline was ‘The Tour is back on’ as Pogačar struck back inside the final 3km of stage 6 to take back 28 seconds of that deficit.
That time, plus the 11 seconds Pogačar had gained on Vingegaard during the Basque Grand Départ, now leaves the pair separated by a mere 25 seconds with six mountain stages – plus the mountainous 22km time trial – left to tackle.
A reminder – there have been no rest days yet in this Tour, and the end of the first week still awaits in Bordeaux on Friday.
Questions about the state of Pogačar’s wrist and his relative lack of preparation – the time trial and road race at the Slovenian National Championships were his only race days since fracturing his wrist at Liège-Bastogne-Liège – hit the top of the agenda in Laruns on Wednesday.
“The mood was good yesterday,” Pogačar’s teammate Matteo Trentin reported after the events of stage 6. “Of course, in the first minutes when we’re all together, we’re not smiling too much. But then we get together, do a small debrief of the race, and when we put everything on the scale, in the end, it wasn’t too much of a bad day. You see that today.”
Those questions about his team leader were swept away as he turned the tables on Vingegaard on the steepest slopes of the Route de Cambasque above Cauterets, darting away from the reigning champion on the 10% gradients…
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