It was a sight we have seen many times: Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) dominating a bike race. Stage 12 of Tour de France was a classic illustration, epitomising Pogačian supremacy — get a teammate (Jhonathan Narváez) to explode his group of rivals at the bottom of a climb with a 30-second acceleration, before launching his own attack and then settling into an infernal rhythm to the top.
It’s not subtle. Everyone can see it coming. It’s just that nobody can keep up. Twelve stages in and this Tour, like last year’s, has been full of examples of Tadej Pogačar doing Tadej Pogačar things. There is not much more to say about the world champion’s dominating performance on the first mountain-top finish of the race. It may seem too early to be writing the obituary of Visma-Lease a Bike’s yellow jersey hopes, but truth be told, and all credit to their valiant attempts at being aggressive in their racing, it is now nigh on impossible for Jonas Vingegaard to win. Despite their numerical disadvantage, after losing João Almeida, UAE Team Emirates-XRG have sealed their fourth maillot jaune, barring a disaster.
With three teams claiming eight of the 12 stages (UAE and Soudal Quick-Step with three; Alpecin with two), others like Lidl-Trek and EF Education-EasyPost taking a stage and jersey success, and Uno X exceeding expectations, less than half the teams will be happy with how the race has gone for them so far. Similar to Pogačar individually holding a monopoly over proceedings, the picture isn’t much brighter for the squads under pressure to salvage something from the most important race of the year. Visma will not give up their battle for the Tour, and there is a major fight for the remaining top 10 positions in the overall. But what can the rest of the riders left in the race take away from the Tour with nine stages remaining?
Yellow is seemingly already decided, but the other classifications are wide open. On the very first stage of the Tour, Lenny Martinez (Bahrain-Victorious) lost 9:11 and quickly turned his focus to the polka-dot jersey. After Pogačar’s win on Hautacam, Martinez is joint-first with 27 points. He faces a monumental task to hold off Pogačar, who although won’t be targeting the KOM classification, is likely to win it thanks to the number of summit finishes and tomorrow’s mountain time trial. However, Martinez and the other climbers, like Michael Storer (Tudor Pro Cycling), won’t give up.
Although unlikely, Lidl-Trek will have to be wary that Pogačar could claim enough points to steal the green jersey from Jonathan Milan. The white jersey battle is beginning to bubble along nicely with the top four — Remco Evenepoel, Florian Lipowitz, Kévin Vauquelin and Oscar Onley — only separated by 1:20 after 12 stages.
However, it’s not only classification jerseys that are still up for grabs. With nine stages to go, it may seem like there are plenty of opportunities left, but a number of them being summit finishes, time is already running out for teams packed with rouleurs. Unless they have a genuine climber among their ranks, like Bahrain with Martinez and Tudor with Michael Storer, they will struggle to get a win over terrain where only a select few can thrive.
Teams who decided not to bother with concerted efforts at getting in the breaks on the comparatively easier stages might already be regretting their tactics. Break formation only gets harder the further into the race we get — desperate teams launch everything they have to salvage their Tours, and more GC teams begin to control more closely as they look to consolidate top 10 positions on the overall.
What might help the chances of the likes of Martinez to get the KOM jersey and for others to nab a stage win from a break, is that Visma’s tactics of pacing hard exposed their own riders today. It is unlikely that they will want to repeat the exact same pacing tactic which clawed back the break on the way to the Hautacam. Likewise UAE no longer need to keep the break so close with the race hierarchy well-established. We could see more freedom for breakaways, but that will only make the fight to get in them more ferocious and competitive.
The examples that have worked well so far require some daring and cunning racing, like EF through Ben Healy and Uno X through Tobias Halland Johannessen, who have taken different routes to claim success. Healy animated the first week with a daring stage six win and two days in yellow, but has since faded in the high mountains. His Tour now looks geared toward stage hunting or a combativity prize. Johannessen, the young Norwegian, impressed on Hautacam with a fourth-place finish — the best climb of his career — and moved into the top 10 overall, with the pressure off thanks to Jonas Abrahamsen’s stage win in Toulouse.
It is unclear how the next nine stages will pan out — as we saw on Wednesday, the most innocuous-looking stages can often light up. Still, the reality of the GC battle is clear: Pogačar has imposed a psychological and tactical burden on everyone else. Unless something dramatic changes — an unlikely implosion by UAE, a sudden loss of form, or a crash — the rest of the peloton is no longer racing for yellow. They’re racing for the other jerseys, for the podium, and for whatever spoils they can salvage from a Tour already gripped by one man and a handful of teams.
