At this point of the Tour de France last year, Matej Mohorič could already celebrate a successful race, having soloed to victory from the breakaway in Le Creusot on stage 7.
He would go on to repeat the feat two weeks later in Libourne, though at this year's Tour neither he nor his Bahrain Victorious teammates have been able to replicate the same results.
Neither has much of the peloton, with only two breakaways succeeding so far in the race via Simon Clarke and Bob Jungels. Mohorič's teammate Fred Wright came within 3km of glory on the uphill finish in Lausanne on Saturday, and the Slovenian has said he had expected more breaks to succeed.
"In this Tour de France, we thought there would be many – like three stages already – where we were pretty sure that the breakaway is going to make it, but they never did," Mohorič told Cyclingnews ahead of stage 9, where Jungels would later solo to glory 60km from the line.
"It's a lot different from last year," he added, referring to the 2021 race which saw eight of its stages won from the early break.
"I think they [UAE Team Emirates and Jumbo-Visma] wasted – or they didn't waste because they won the stages afterwards – but they spent a lot of energy chasing down the breakaways.
"So, they can't do that, or I don't think they can do that, for the rest of the Tour. Sooner or later, it will go back to the [usual] two races in one with the breakaway going for the stage and the GC guys fighting each other."
While Mohorič himself hasn't been out in the break yet in this year's Tour, he is keeping an eye on future stages for chances he can take while also supporting the team's GC leader Damiano Caruso.
"There are always chances and there are many stages coming that look good on paper," he said. "But you need to feel the moment and be a little bit lucky, not wasting the energy to get in the breakaway, so we'll see how it goes."
Mohorič's lack of action so far in the race doesn't have anything to do with a lack of condition in comparison to 2021, he said. Instead, he pointed towards "a lot of wasted energy" with the nine days so far being raced at a very high pace.
The numbers bear out Mohorič's assertion, with the average speed through nine stages lying at 44.544kph, 2kph more than the same point in 2021 and the quickest race – so far – since 2005.
"I think I'm physically on the same level, yes," he said. "But it's been a fast race so far. We didn't really do a very tough or demanding stage yet. The stages that were easy on paper proved to be very, very hard and demanding.
"We wasted a lot of energy there, but now when we get to the actual tough stages with a lot of metres of climbing, we'll see how it plays out."
