The whoops of delight from inside the UAE Team Emirates race bus near the Tour de France stage 6 finish at Longwy were clearly audible to journalists outside when Tadej Pogačar crossed the line to claim both the stage win and the yellow jersey. As the Slovenian’s teammates wheeled to a halt outside, the celebratory mood only increased all the more.
Pogačar’s last-minute attack had not been planned, the riders told journalists, and they will now face much more work on the front of the bunch for a possibly, very significant extra chunk of time in what is already an exhausting three-week race.
But while the benefits of Pogačar’s ultra-aggressive racing style were plain to see as he raced across the line with an enormous roar of satisfaction, as his teammates said, neither his superiority nor his versatility on all kinds of terrain were a surprise any more. So if that meant extra responsibility in the race, so be it.
“It wasn’t even necessarily part of the plan [that he attack], but we were all there in those last few climbs and we just went for it. We had faith in him and he pulled it off,” US rider Brandon McNulty, 22nd on the stage, told journalists as he began his warm-down. “It’s more on us with the jersey but you can never really turn it down.”
McNulty’s teammate Rafa Majka, next across the line for UAE Team Emirates, was equally delighted with Pogačar’s success, and the huge hug that he gave McNulty showed how pleased he was with the role he and the American had played. Majka also underlined the collective superiority UAE Team Emirates had managed to show in the concluding segment of one of the most arduous stages so far in this year’s Tour.
“We pulled on the stage with some other teams at first, but after 220 kilometres it’s always a different race,” Majka said.
“We had the legs as a team, and I could see after the first climb [of the final three -Ed.] that Tadej was in great shape. Me and Brandon really pulled hard and then Tadej handled the sprint.
“Sometimes in the first stages of this year’s race we were a little bit behind but today we showed them we were there.”
At the end of a resoundingly-fast day, Majka and McNulty said that they had never anticipated the longest stage of the Tour to be run off so quickly, particularly coming straight after the Roubaix-style stage on Wednesday.
“We were never expecting the stage to be so hard, that so many attacks and Van Aert going off the front,” Majka said. “But some teams helped us and we all kept control…
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