After demolishing his Tour de France rivals and taking the yellow jersey at Gavarnie-Gèdre on Thursday, Tadej Pogačar enjoyed an uneventful stage seven, finishing the day still sitting pretty 2:42 ahead of Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), with Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) taking the bunch sprint win.
You get the impression this will be the first of many straightforward days in yellow lying ahead for UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s Pogačar. Even on the high mountain stages where his rivals could take him on at his own game, it feels as though something exceptional will need to happen even for someone to take a small chunk of his lead from him.
For many race followers, the only chance of overturning Pogačar would seem to be if he has a bad day, or crashes – with the latter being a scenario that even Vingegaard‘s fans wouldn’t wish for.
Along those lines, he was asked after stage seven about his bad day on the Col du Granon in 2022, when he ceded the yellow jersey to Vingegaard, finishing the stage 2:51 behind the Dane – an uncannily similar amount of time to that by which he leads the race now.
That day he was the victim of a poor feeding strategy. How had he evolved since that day four years ago, he was asked.
“If I look at my physical capabilities, of course I’m a bit better than back then,” he told journalists. “My mind is growing as well, and [my] experience.”
However, he added: “I think one of the biggest changes that we could do as a team is organisation around the feeding and having really good hydration and nutrition [plan].”
That included regulating his body temperature, he said, describing the current race as “hellish hot”. Indeed, on the day of stage seven, the finishing city of Bordeaux was sizzling in 37-degree temperatures.
“This Tour is hellish hot, [but] for sure my body temperature is cooler than it was in 2022 or any before, because we really keep focused on cooling down,” he said. “I think that’s a big difference. Just planning, organisation and motivation for the next few days is very different to what it was in 2022.”
In theory, then, we won’t be seeing Pogačar losing yellow to a blood-sugar crash again in the next two weeks like he did that day in 2022. That said, his team no doubt believed they had their strategies nailed that day too. Best laid plans, as they say. It’s a hoary old rider favourite, but there’s no denying the sheer factual correctness of the phrase, “the Tour isn’t over till it’s over”. We’ll all have to wait and see.
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