Tadej Pogacar’s rapacious appetite for stage wins was in evidence yet again in the climbs of the Vosges on Saturday, as he raced to his fourth victory of this year’s Tour de France at Le Markstein.
Pogacar’s attack came 1.6 km from the summit of the final climb, the Col de Haag, and 7.5 km from the finish line and once again left Jonas Vingegaard, Paul Seixas and Remco Evenepoel in his wake.
It was the Slovene’s 25th stage win in the Tour. “We knew today was one of the hardest mountain stages,” the four-time Tour champion said, “but we grabbed the opportunity.”
“We made it hard and the other guys showed fight, so big respect to all the rivals, but I couldn’t waste good legs.”
With a week’s racing to come, Vingegaard is the only rider in the overall standings within five minutes of Pogacar, but despite that he insisted the race was far from over. “In 2023, I lost two minutes to Jonas in the time trial and the next day I lost eight minutes, so it’s quite obvious anything can change in one day.”
Pogacar admitted that his mood had dipped a little towards the end of last week, but said his partner, Urska Zigart, a fellow professional rider, had called him on Saturday morning. “I can say for now I’m more confident. Morale is good.”
It seems, too, that speculation linking the Tour leader to competing in the Vuelta a España in August is well-founded. The Spanish race is the only Grand Tour the Slovene has yet to win. The race stages its Gran Salida in Monaco and Prince Albert said on Friday: “Pogacar said he would be at the start, so I hope that happens.”
Pogacar said: “If the Prince said, it’s a high chance.” A win in the Vuelta would achieve a grand slam of Europe’s three Grand Tours.
As Pogacar was enjoying another victory, Tom Pidcock was suffering, paying heavily, as some had predicted, for the efforts he made on the previous day’s stage to Belfort. The double Olympic champion’s podium challenge came apart on the early slopes of the Col de Haag when Seixas’s Decathlon CMA CGM shattered the main peloton by setting a relentless rhythm.
Almost immediately, Pidcock lost ground as Pogacar and Vingegaard rode on at the head of the group. The Briton tumbled from second overall, midway through the stage, to seventh at the finish.
But the battle for the other podium positions is intensifying. Seixas, a discreet presence since the opening weekend in Montjuic, matched Vingegaard on the rolling descent to the finish line, before dropping the double Tour winner on the sprint to the finish and taking the lead in the young rider’s classification.
Seixas is fourth overall and just 15 seconds away from third place, held by Evenepoel. His sports director, Luke Rowe, the former Team Sky road captain who is now working for the French rider’s Decathlon team, struck a pragmatic note. “It’s nice to be optimistic, but sometimes you have to be realistic,” he said. “The realistic situation is that there is one guy substantially better than the rest of the GC [general classification] leaders and the rest of the peloton.”
Rowe, who started 10 Grand Tours, has been mentoring Seixas as the teenager adjusts to the demands of three weeks of racing. One of the biggest lessons has been reining in the breakneck descending style that led to Seixas’s high-speed crash in June.
Rowe described him as “a 19-year-old kid, who was descending very fast for the first half of the year”, and added that, during the Tour, Seixas had been “a little bit more cautious”.
“If you’re racing GC, then a lot of the days it’s about getting from A to B, being patient and conservative, which some people think is boring,” he said, “but that’s what it takes to be on the podium in the Tour.”
