One of the great pleasures in my life as a sportswriter is being wrong.
The more I get to do this job, the more I have relinquished any belief that I know what will happen and why. I prefer increasingly simple answers. I am not a betting woman. I like to be surprised more than I like to be right.
Yesterday, when Wout van Aert went in the breakaway, there was mass Internet speculation about what he was doing and why. This speculation ranged from truly gossipy — such as whether Van Aert was discontent with how things were going in the team and that his attack was a statement of worth (Note: I do not find this at all credible) — to more clearheaded wondering about if Van Aert’s daring ploy was part of some unforseen tactical masterpiece, a grand schema in which all would come together neatly. Perhaps it did, in that by the end of the day, Vingegaard, with the help of Sepp Kuss, put a minute into Pogačar on the Col de Marie Blanque.
Van Aert tiring out the reserves of his rivals’ teams couldn’t have hurt, sure. But for all this analysis all that really spoke in the end was the legs. It’s possible that Van Aert was trying to win his own race, but he did not. It’s possible that he was a master manipulator playing his role in Jumbo Visma’s Gesamtkunstwerk Tour de France, but only hindsight and whatever can be gleaned in interviews (which actually serve this purpose regardless of how boring they are) will reveal that to us.
The other stuff, the tea leaf reading, is fun though. Borderline irresistable. And today I fully and with my whole chest admit that I’d read my tea leaves wrong. I thought Tadej Pogačar was a dead man walking. He was not.
The Col du Tourmalet is made of short, anemic grass and pain. For yesterday’s hero and maillot jaune wearer Jai Hindley, the second part of that formula was probably more noticable than the first. Dropped, he could only watch, wide-eyed, when Pogačar and Vingegaard and whoever could cling on took off in search of those still ahead and, hopefully soon, the crest of the climb. They found them.
Things collected themselves on the descent. A ragtag group formed including, among others, polka-dot-hunter Powless, Van Aert, a renewed Mihal Kwiatkowski and Tobias Johannessen, the young Norwegian from UnoX and winner of the Tour de L’Avenir, who in the end came an astonishing third. What commenced after was a war of classic and bitter attrition, though it took until the last four and a half kilometers, the final climb, for Vingegaard and Pogačar to launch and for Van Aert and company to be left to die on the bike. Kwiatkowski notably tried to hang on, but he, too, succumbed.
What happened next was remarkable and unexpected. On the Cauterets, a real bitch of a hill, Pogačar, as though in spite of his alleged weakness, dug in and went alone. Vingegaard, for whatever reason, could not follow. It could be a tactical blunder by Jumbo Visma, in their attempt to repeat yesterday’s total cycling. It could be a miscalculation of Pogačar’s form. It could be that the Dane went too deep the day before in order to twist the knife into his opponent and let him bleed out. But in the end it doesn’t matter. The legs were not there. The body’s reserves were depleated and in that moment, the athlete enters a state of self-preservation and helplessness. There is nothing he can do except try to manage his pace and hope that the time doesn’t go out too long. Sometimes the simplest answer is the only answer. One man was stronger than the other on the day.
All was left on the slopes of the mountain.
As for Pogačar, I should have known, having profiled him no fewer than three times, that he would never give up. Never. His slogan for his kids’ team is actually, literally, Always keep trying and never give up! He is full of such tenacity he passes it onto others. There’s a great line from the Slovenian poet Edvard Kocbek that goes, “Fear and courage age differently.” We assumed wrongly that Pogačar would be afraid because he had lost, that he would retreat into peloton, wither, and leave. I include myself in the we. I texted colleagues about how I thought he would drop out by Stage 10 and start training for the Vuelta. Rumours about the wrist circulated, none of which could be verified. Vingegaard was declared too fast, inhuman and unbeatable — to quote from the same poem: “speed has a particular insanity about it.” The Tour, it seemed, was over.
But Pogačar is made of different stuff — fear and courage age differently. Alone on the mountain in his last year in the white jersey, it is clear in which trajectory he is aging. As soon as the sunlight near the crest alighted him, time expanded the nooks and crannies separating the two men. All of a sudden, Vingegaard’s killer minute had shrunk into a mere 25 seconds, his impenetrable strength pierced by the dagger dealt by the one man worthy to be called his rival.
When Pogačar crossed the line, he took a deep bow.
Let this be a humbling lesson to us all: Nothing is ever finished.
Beautiful writing
Above all, we should be grateful that we are living to witness a great battle between these 2 riders. Given the last two days, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that there will be more “turning of the table” will happen between these two terrific champions in the coming two weeks.