Pundits and some in the peloton may have already declared this year’s Tour de France a two-man contest for the yellow jersey and a separate battle for third, but Jai Hindley isn’t writing anything or anyone off in what has already been a remarkable race debut for the Australian.
The 27-year-old conceded time to Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) and Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) after losing touch with the pair on the steep slopes of the Puy de Dôme on Sunday but maintained his third place on general classification.
Hindley (Bora-Hansgrohe) after nine stages is two minutes and 40 seconds adrift of defending champion and race leader Vingegaard and 2:23 on Pogačar, but has a handy buffer on ‘the rest’, with Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Grenadiers), Pogačar’s teammate Adam Yates, and Simon Yates (Jayco-AlUla), the next best on the overall standings at more than four minutes down.
The climber is tempering expectations in his maiden Tour participation just over 12 months after becoming the first Australian to win the Giro d’Italia. But the understated, though no less steely, conviction that helped deliver him the maglia rosa has already been seen at the Tour, when he won stage five to wear the yellow jersey for a day, and he is prepared for what’s to come.
“I’m feeling pretty good and pretty fresh still considering, and ready for some more hard racing,” Hindley said. “I’m not focusing too much on the end result at the moment. I’m just really trying to do my best each and every day and take the opportunities when they come.
“There’s still a long way to go and I don’t think the race is done by any means. I think these top two guys have shown they’re in a level of their own but it’s still a lot of racing and a lot of things can happen. And there’s plenty of other guys still in the top 10 who are not out of the fight, and I would never write anyone off.”
Hindley spent five to six weeks on the road with Bora-Hansgrohe coach Hendrik Werner specifically in preparation for the Tour. The pair worked on sharpening his strengths as much as perceived weaknesses and underwent a hefty amount of physical course reconnaissance, including multiple stages in the first and third term of the race.
The latter has already paid off, with Hindley’s solo win in Laruns. Bora-Hansgrohe were aware then that they couldn’t defend the yellow jersey to Paris but had hoped to keep it until Sunday. Hindley lost touch with Vingegaard and Pogačar on the Tourmalet on stage six but wasn’t disconcerted by that, focusing on working smart as well as hard.
“The Tourmalet was actually the first ever mountain I rode when I was a kid, so it was pretty cool to go back wearing the yellow jersey and to ride over that climb in a race was really special actually. I’m really enjoying it. Really,” Hindley said in a press conference during the Tour’s first rest day on Monday.
“It’s been a really hard first nine days and for me personally, I’ve gone all out when I had to and been conservative when I could be, and I think that’s really important. I’m really trying to pace my effort every day basically.”
Hindley didn’t plan to be in the breakaway from which he won stage five but made the most of the opportunity and has placed an emphasis on showing himself in the third week of the Tour, banking on his ability to physically improve the further he gets into it.
“Generally in Grand Tours, I come into my own and find my best legs later in the race and in the third week so actually it was a new challenge for me, let’s say, coming here with the hard stages already in Bilbao,” he said.
“Being in really good form already in the first week is not something that I normally do for Grand Tours. I normally come in a bit underdone and then get better throughout but I think, or I hope, that the trend continues, and I still feel good in the last half of the race.”
Speaking earlier in the week, Werner reflected on Hindley’s natural leadership ability within the team he joined only last season, his race instinct, and his recovery.
“It’s outstanding how much he can recover compared to others. Sometimes when I talk to the doc and he’s on at the finish they’re like, ‘Oh f—k, let’s see tomorrow,’ but then tomorrow he was able to repeat again,” said Werner.
“So, then you see this guy he can really sustain a lot. That’s a great asset. I think also he’s really, really cool. And by cool, I mean not just laid-back but the power of letting go. He takes decisions, he has to take massive decisions in a race but also afterwards I have the impression that he’s not looking too much back and putting all the amount of regret to it what anyway won’t change something he decided.”
The Tour resumes on Tuesday with several lumpy stages on the agenda for the second term, and Hindley is aware he’ll need to be vigilant in them, with a host of riders looking to dig into his advantage.
“Every day is really tough at the Tour. Also, the sprint stages that we’ve had have all been really hard. I think we have quite a few of these intermediate stages where they’re not pure sprint stages, they’re not mountain stages, they’re in-between, I think these can be some of the most tricky stages and some of the hardest actually so I think we’re in for another big week of hard racing no doubt,” he said.
Simon Yates, who was strong on the Puy de Dôme despite his involvement in a crash the day before, is among those rivals but concedes the gaps on the general classification are already large.
“I think it’s quite close between the rest of us but there are also some big gaps with Jai [Hindley] with his stage win there, he was a minute and a half or more in front, so he’s got a nice buffer,” Yates said after stage nine.
“I unfortunately crashed yesterday and lost almost a minute so that’s also not great for myself, but I think in terms of climbing and how I’ve been riding I think it’s quite close.
“I got some time on Jai today. A little bit of time on Carlos Rodriguez as well. So, we’ll see how that plays out in the coming weeks but who knows.”
