Tourreporter
Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar are the top favorites in the battle for the yellow jersey at the Tour de France. The expected duel will probably play a central role on the first stage.
One more breather. The field of riders of the Tour de France rolls through the streets of Bilbao, past the curved building of the Guggenheim Museum, out of the city – in a kind of parade. After 11.3 kilometers of parade, tour director Christian Prudhomme waves a flag out of his red car and starts the 110th edition of the Tour of France. And then?
3,221 vertical meters at the start in Bilbao
“This tour starts with a big bang,” says Pole Michael Kwiatkowski from the Ineos Grenadiers team. Even the first stage can show who wins the tour in the end. Kwiatkowski knows about these things. He was a key helper to Bradley Wiggins, Christopher Froome and Egan Bernal on their Tour victories.
This time there is no rolling up, no appetizer for the next three weeks of cycling, we get straight to the point. The first stage of the Tour de France covers 182 kilometers around Bilbao. 3,221 vertical meters are on the menu at the start. With the Pike Bideo – which the French have renamed Côte de Pike for their race – there is an ascent around nine kilometers before the finish line, which is only two kilometers long but has an average of ten percent steepness, and even 15.6 percent in the last few meters slope reached.
Pogacar – the cannibal in spring
There, at the latest, the two big favorites will clash for the yellow jersey. Because – everyone agrees – the Tour de France will again be a duel this year between Jonas Vingegaard, 26, the overall winner last summer, and Tadej Pogacar, 24, the tour winner of 2020 and 2021. The other classification riders apply at best as a contender for the remaining place next to the two on the podium in Paris.
Pogacar had lived up to its reputation as the new cannibal in the field in the spring. Like Eddy Merckx, he dominated most of the races he competed in. He achieved ten victories by mid-April – preferably on his own. Among them were successes in the Tour of Flanders, the Amstel Gold Race and the Flèche Wallone. But then a fall at Liège-Bastogne-Liège abruptly ended the Slovenian’s winning streak and severely disrupted his preparation for the Tour de France.
Pogacar’s wrist almost restored
With three broken bones in his left wrist and a cast, training on the street was not possible, and the injury largely disabled him for six weeks. However, his hand is no longer painful and the mobility of the joint is 60 or 70 percent restored, Pogacar reported. A computer tomography last Monday showed that two of the three broken bones have now completely healed, the third still needs a bit.
Pogacar explained that he had trained properly in the past few days. He also won both titles at the Slovenian championships. Of course he won the road race solo and in the individual time trial he was more than five minutes faster than the second. “The legs are good, the mentality is super good,” Pogacar stated dryly before the start in Bilbao.
Vingegaard does not see himself as the hunted
At Vingegaard’s Team Jumbo-Visma, they don’t believe that Pogacar didn’t come to the Tour de France in full possession anyway. “I expect him to be in top form,” says the team’s sporting director, Grischa Niermann. The fact that the Slovenian tried in the days before the tour to make Vingegaard the sole favorite and to bring his new noble helper in the UAE Emirates team, the British Adam Yates, into play as co-captain is a psychological game at Jumbo-Visma posted.
Vingegaard himself changed the role of the hunted into that of the hunter in Bilbao, because after all he was chasing his second tour win. The Dane didn’t have quite as outstanding a spring as his rival. At Paris-Nice he was clearly inferior to Pogacar. But at the Dauphiné Tour in June, an important form test before the Tour de France, Vingegaard then also easily drove away from the competition.
Attacks right at the start
Last year’s winner firmly expects Pogacar to attack right at the start of the tour – just to show that he’s there. The shorter but steep climbs on the first stage are more the terrain for the Slovenian with his explosive driving style, while Vingegaard prefers the long climbs in the high mountains.
But of course the Dane is prepared. “We trained that too,” says his sporting director Niermann. And at the Dauphiné, Vingegaard recently proved “that he is now also extremely good at these short, steep and explosive climbs.” And feel Pogacar on the tooth – or on the wrist – Vingegaard and his team will also want to.
This is not good news for riders like Frenchman Julian Alaphilippe or Dutchman Mathieu van der Poel, who have a profile like that of stage one and who might be hoping for the first yellow jersey. “I wonder if UAE and Jumbo will try to control the whole stage and make it difficult,” says Michael Kwiatkowski. Because then it would be difficult right at the beginning of the stage with two climbs immediately after kilometer zero: “It will definitely be one of the toughest starts of the Tour de France ever.”
