Tadej Pogacar, riding for the UAE Emirates team, further staked his claim for final victory in the 2024 Tour de France with a dominant but instinctive victory over Jonas Vingegaard in the first summit finish of the race at Pla d’Adet ski station in the Hautes Pyrenees.
Pogacar, winner of the Tour in 2020 and 2021, accelerated violently from the main favourites, just under five kilometres from the high-altitude finish, to extend his lead on the Danish defending champion, leader of the Visma Lease-a-bike team, to almost two minutes.
“The plan was to make the sprint hard and maybe take some seconds and the stage win, but in the end this is much better,” he said. “This is very good news. We have to try and maintain this position.”
It was the ninth time that the duellists had finished first and second in the same Tour stage since their rivalry began, a statistic that reflects how closely matched they have become. “It’s a game we play,” Pogacar, already winner of this year’s Giro d’Italia, said afterwards. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”
Pogacar admitted after the stage that he was indebted to his British teammate Adam Yates, whose lone attack, seven kilometres from the finish, paved the way for the Slovenian’s explosive effort.
“It was a little bit of improvisation,” Yates said after the stage. “I was ready to do the pace, as usual, and Tadej told me to attack. I was like, ‘What?!’”
Yates revealed that Pogacar’s tactics are sometimes even a mystery to his teammates. “With Tadej, I’ve got no idea sometimes. This morning, he said: ‘You can win if you go full gas.’ You never know.”
Pogacar admitted he had acted on instinct but was vague on the details of his mid-race conversation with Yates. “Man, it’s so hard to speak on the climb, with so many people cheering and you’re also on the limit,” Pogacar said. “I just screamed at him and he screamed back at me, just a few words.”
