The gloves are not quite off, but punches are being thrown with increasing frequency at the Tour de France. The defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), declared his position at the start of the race: three months on from his horror crash, he was “lucky to be here”, and when he lost time on stage four, it was classified as a positive result – “I expected to be 3-0 down,” he remarked.
References to his several broken bones and six weeks of preparation have been constant utterances from the usually shy Dane in the first race’s first-half, a slow indoctrination to ensure that the narrative is on his recovery, and to place the pressure firmly at the cleats of his great challenger, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates). The man who’s won the last two Tours, goes the message, is the underdog. Indeed, UAE have been nodding along in agreement; the messaging has cut through.
For a week, Pogačar, and his companions, didn’t react, and they accepted the storyline. For three years, the relationship between Pogačar and Vingegaard has been cordial, amicable, respectful, but now the tension, and the frustration, is ramping up. It was Remco Evenepoel, one of the other two horses in the race for yellow, who triggered the next chapter in the mind games, saying after stage nine’s gravel stage that Vingegaard “needed balls”. It was the cue that UAE, and Pogačar, clearly wanted in order to go in themselves; the time had come to hit back at Visma-Lease a Bike’s insistence that Vingegaard can’t win a third consecutive Tour.
Pavel Sivakov, one of Pogačar’s key helpers, pointedly said after stage 11: “They’ve been playing the victim a bit since the start but we don’t really buy into this.” João Almeida, another one of UAE’s stash of super-domestiques, throw their own medicine back at Visma and Vingegaard: “I think they think they came here as an underdog, but we all knew he was quite good and you can see he is flying.” Pogačar himself then took things further, saying “now everyone can see he is in the best shape of his career.” Vingegaard laughed at such a suggestion.
Stage 11, a savage day across the Massif Central with more than 4,000 metres of accumulated climbing, marked the fourth time this race that Pogačar, eager from the outset to build a substantial lead in yellow, has attacked.
Only once, up and over the Col du Galibier has he had success, and even that was minimal at 35 seconds; the other three times Vingegaard, the rider apparently so out-of-form, has either been on his wheel or, in the case of Wednesday, clawed back a deficit that stretched to almost 40 seconds before beating the Slovenian in a summit finish sprint. There is no greater head banger than being reigned-in and then bested. The war of words has intensified, but Vingegaard has found another way to win the mental stakes.
“Jonas was five centimetres faster than me today,” Pogačar, in yellow by 1-06 to Evenepoel and 1-14 to Vingegaard, reflected. “Chapeau to him, he deserved this victory… now we can say it’s a fair fight.” When Vingegaard caught up to him, Pogačar, so rarely reeled in, “was a little bit surprised.”
Many have identified that Vingegaard is struggling on the descents, but he’s looking Pogačar’s match the longer the climbs go on. “I don’t really see any weakness in Jonas’s downhill,” Pogačar said. “He’s going really fast… he is really confident. We can say that we are more or less at a similar level. We stick to the plan, I tried, sometimes you succeed how you want, and sometimes not. It’s not the end of the world.”
But Pogačar was visibly uneasy. In the last few days, May’s Giro d’Italia victor has looked tired, and he’s been less of his effervescent and upbeat self. He’s started biting to the bait thrown out by Visma, but more concerningly he knows that the cyclist’s mantra of ‘let the legs do the talking’ might not prove sufficient.
Vingegaard is coming back, even if he continues to speak on the same page he has been on since the start in Florence: “I don’t care,” he has staunchly said when asked to react to Evenepoel’s Sunday comments and then Sivakov’s words on Wednesday. “I am playing the victim card a bit because I am [the victim]. Seeing where I came from, I don’t think a lot of guys would have made this Tour de France.” Moments earlier, he drummed home his messaging to the greatest level yet: “I really believed I was going to die three months ago,” he said.
Pogačar, the laughing, confident and extrovert young boy playing on his favourite toy, has won the popularity contest during the duo’s riveting three-year battle, but this summer it’s Vingegaard, the shy, calculated and introverted father, who is winning the communication battle.
UAE have realised they need to act. “He [Pogačar] gained time on everyone [else today], that’s the main point, and eventually we will put time into Jonas,” Almeida asserted. “I trust him, I trust him.” Where will he add to his lead? “Everywhere, any day – any day we can take the win.” Pogačar, jaded after an hour of interviews, wasn’t quite as lyrical, but he smiled as he said: “We will see in the big mountains how it will go.”
This is the era of record fast times, the generation of aero socks and of ingesting 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour, but even in spite of scientific advancements, it’s still provocative comments getting under a person’s and a collective team’s skin that can prove the most crucial separator. The niceties and pleasantries between Pogačar and Vingegaard appear to be reaching their conclusions, and this is becoming the Tour de Mind Games.
Pogačar sits in yellow, but he wanted a much more comfortable lead, aware that the Alpine stages suit his adversary so much more. “We wanted to take some time, but it is what it is,” Sivakov sighed. Vingegaard, meanwhile, is reciting the same lines like a schooled politician in campaign mode, and he can see the momentum is coming his way. “I cannot believe how I made it to this level,” he signed off.
