When Diego Maradona scored the goal of the century against England at the 1986 World Cup, the dizzying magic of the moment was happily encased forever in the immortal words of radio commentator Victor Hugo Morales, who cried out: “Cosmic kite, what planet did you come from?!”
To evoke the extraterrestrial in football is to offer the sincerest form of praise, but at the Tour de France, the same metaphor carries a very different connotation. The headline on the front page of L’Équipe on Wednesday morning hardly read like a ringing endorsement of Jonas Vingegaard’s probity: “From another planet.”
Vingegaard’s stunning dominance in the Combloux time trial on stage 16 had seen the Jumbo-Visma rider put some 1:38 into Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and place a hefty down payment on final overall victory. It also moved L’Équipe to dust off the kind of language employed on page one when Lance Armstrong stunned the Tour at Sestriere in 1999, a result since excised from the record books.
On Wednesday afternoon, Vingegaard seemed to move to a place beyond all adjectives when he delivered another chilling show of strength on the Col de la Loze, putting the maillot jaune firmly and definitively beyond the reach of Pogačar and anybody else.
Vingegaard began his onslaught on the upper reaches of the Col de la Loze shortly after Pogačar had begun to flag 8km or so from the summit, and he continued at a remorseless pace all the way to the top. Whatever about another planet, Vingegaard certainly looked to be competing in a completely different race to everybody else on the road to Courchevel.
The Dane reached the finish fourth on the stage, 1:52 down on early escapee Felix Gall (AG2R Citroën), but almost two minutes ahead of Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates), and just shy of six minutes clear of Pogačar. In the overall standings, Vingegaard is now 7:35 up on Pogačar and more than 10 minutes clear of everybody else. Time gaps from another century.
At the weekend, Vingegaard had told reporters that he could “understand” why the extremely high levels of performance at this Tour had been greeted with scepticism given the history of doping in the sport. In Courchevel on Wednesday evening, Vingegaard was asked what he and his Jumbo-Visma team could do the allay the suspicions that such outsized performances inevitably generate.
“For me, it’s hard to tell what more you can say,” Vingegaard said. “I guess, I understand that it’s hard to trust in cycling with the past there has been. But I think nowadays everyone is different than they were 20 years ago. And I can tell from my heart that I don’t take anything. I don’t take anything I would not give to my daughter, and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”
On Wednesday morning, both Vingegaard’s Jumbo-Visma and Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates squads were selected for additional doping controls, with blood tests carried out on the riders an hour before the start in Saint Gervais. In the post-stage press conference, Vingegaard was asked his feelings about the use of performance-enhancing medicines that are not yet prohibited.
“I’ve never heard about such a substance so I don’t know exactly what it does or what it is, it’s hard for me to say anything about it, if it should be illegal or not,” Vingegaard said. “I never took it and I never heard about it before.”
Dominance
Throughout this Tour, Vingegaard had repeatedly suggested that the race would be decided by minutes rather than seconds. The prediction appeared fanciful when he and Pogačar were scrapping over bonus seconds in the Alps at the weekend, but the Dane has been proven correct by the striking events of the past two days.
“It comes from believing in our own strengths and abilities,” Vingegaard said of his prediction. “Either that or that Tadej would be so much stronger at one point that he would gap me. When you always go on the attack, you make yourself vulnerable and it’s kind of easy for the other one to make a bigger difference."
From the outset, it seems, Vingegaard had backed his powers of endurance and his Jumbo-Visma squad had placed a particular emphasis on the first two stages after the second rest day. The defending champion confessed that he had been underwhelmed by the Tour route when it was presented in October, but Jumbo-Visma management quickly identified the Col de la Loze, with its 2,300-metre altitude, as the centrepiece of Vingegaard’s strategy to beat Pogačar.
“We’re working from the plan. Mostly it’s the performance team who make the plan on what my qualities are, I think they do it already in December,” Vingegaard said. “They do it kind of early and then they work on it all the time. I would say even with yesterday’s result, we didn’t change the plan. We stuck to the plan because we thought it was the best plan. We talked about it before, we really believe in the plan that we made.”
Perhaps the most telling indication of Vingegaard’s dominance came near the top of the Loze, when he was briefly forced to stop when a motorbike broke down and blocked the traffic in front of him. Unlike the controversy created by the motorbike that impeded Pogačar’s attempt to sprint for bonus seconds on the Col de Joux Plane on Saturday, this episode was a mere footnote to his exhibition.
“I don’t know exactly what happened, I just know a lot of vehicles in front of me I could not pass,” said Vingegaard.
It scarcely mattered. By then, the Tour was already won, of course, even if Vingegaard dutifully tried to insist otherwise.
“I’m very relieved to have more than seven minutes of a gap, it’s very nice but we’re not in Paris yet,” he said. “There are tricky stages still to come and Pogačar never gives up.”
