An end to the doubts? Tadej Pogačar returns to centre stage in the Tour de France - Analysis

Rip up the script and start again. Three days after 2024 Tour de France race leader Tadej Pogačar was being asked in press conferences if Jonas Vingegaard had gained the upper hand in their GC duel, at Pla d'Adet on stage 14, the UAE Team Emirates leader delivered the most convincing of answers on the road to that particular question. And after his latest spectacular solo mountain-top stage victory, few would doubt if Pogačar is back in full command of the Tour.

It´s currently a real rollercoaster of a Tour GC battle, though, and just to review the last few developments, on stage 11 in the Massif Central, Pogačar’s ability to drop Vingegaard on the brutally steep slopes of Puy Mary briefly had all the feel of an attack that would decide the entire Tour de France. And if Vingegaard was in trouble when Pogačar blazed away that day, even if Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and Primoz Roglič  (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) put up a gutsy rearguard action, the remainder of the GC rivals looked even less likely to threaten the Slovenian. 

However, the way Visma-Lease A Bike leader not only clawed his way back into contention on stage 11 but then outsprinted Pogačar suddenly set the cat among the pigeons. More than the victory itself, Vingegaard´s ability to get back on terms with Pogačar was a hugely significant psychological blow, given how rarely (if at all) Pogačar has been truly challenged in his stage racing goals this season.

And so the race came to Pla d’Adet and stage 14, which ended up being the ninth Tour de France stage where Pogačar and Vingegaard claimed the top two positions on the day. As a result of their outmatching the rest of the field, Evenepoel has dropped from second to third on GC, too, leaving the Dane and the Slovenian at the top of the overall, just as has been the case for the last three years in the Tour.

But if Vingegaard exceeded expectations in the two-up sprint in Le Lioran, at Pla d’Adet it was Pogačar who rose to the occasion, quite possibly even beyond his own hopes. His main idea, Pogačar said afterwards had been to fight for a small group sprint. Instead, he claimed nearly 40 seconds advantage on the Dane, taking his 13th Tour stage win and considerably buttressing his overall advantage, too - to a total of nearly two minutes.

So if Vingegaard was the moral victor of the previous high mountains battle at Le Lioran, this latest success once again gives Pogačar the  GC momentum he risked losing so badly three days ago. Rather than Vingegaard automatically getting the upper hand in the second and third week as he rides into full race form - and as happened in the 2023 Tour and people were all but taken for granted after stage 11 and Le Lioran - the Slovenian has dramatically stemmed the tide.

The Pyrenees are far from over, though, and Vingegaard could well be looking to inflict some serious damage on the even harder stage 15, which contains both the greatest elevation gain of the entire Tour  - 4,800 metres - and no less than five cat.1 or higher-ranked climbs. It´s worth remembering Plateau de Beille, the last and hardest of them, has proved a major turning point in four Tours - most notably in its debut year in the race in 1998, when overall winner Marco Pantani gained his first significant time gap on arch-rival Jan Ullrich en route to the very same Giro-Tour double that Pogačar is looking to capture.

But if Vingegaard insisted - rightly -  that his time loss at Pla d'Adet was a setback, not a rout, and that there was still everything to play for, there can be no doubt that Pogačar has also received the most timely of boosts to his morale, too. 

So where does the Tour head from here? After the opening round in the Pyrenees, all the factors that were previously in play still remain part of the 2024 GC game: Pogačar continues to have a narrow but not decisive edge on Vingegaard in the mountains, the Dane continues to be an extremely hard nut to crack on the climbs, and Evenepoel is fighting hard but still at a slowly increasing distance from the two top candidates for victory. 

Nobody has forgotten, either, that Evenepoel is, on paper, likely to be the best of all three in the final Monaco time trial, or that Vingegaard could well benefit from his lack of racing to be the fresher in the third week.

But for now, Pogačar continues to hold the reins of power in the Tour de France, too, and on the evidence of stage 14, any shadows of doubts about his condition produced by stage 11 will now have evaporated. The Tour may not be his to lose, then, - not yet, anyway - but with just a third of the race remaining, he is still very much the man to beat.

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