Fresh across the line in the saturating heat at Gavarnie-Gèdre after stage six of the Tour de France, Adam Yates helped dissect the mindset and ability of teammate, stage winner and new yellow jersey Tadej Pogačar.
“Good,” Yates said, after journalists broke the news that Pogačar had reclaimed the race lead, before explaining that life as a classification leader is all the Slovenian knows in the Tour.
“For him, I think he said on the bus the other day, he doesn’t know any different – he’s always in white or yellow or polka-dot or something, so he doesn’t know the other side of the Tour de France, where you get to go in the bus and have a shower and all this, so I think it also shows his mental resilience,” he said.
Asked whether he continued to be amazed by his Slovenian teammate, who had turned in his longest ever winning solo break in the Tour at 43km, Yates said: “When he does stuff like this… I mean, it’s pretty normal for him,” he joked.
Yates had been a key part of the UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad that bossed the stage on both the Col d’Aspin and the hors-category Col du Tourmalet, setting the stage for Pogačar to take flight, five kilometres from the summit of the latter.
He had passed through the finishing paddock a little over eight minutes before Yates arrived, his head bowed, face swarming in beads of sweat and looking pale from a combination of heat and effort – but ready to pull on the yellow jersey once again.
Yates described Pogačar’s 2:42 lead on chief rival Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) as “a good advantage”.
“The climb here today, the last climb after the Tourmalet is more like a valley climb,” Yates went on. “It’s not like a real climb so, you know, Tadej when he’s on these kinds of rolling roads, he’s one of the best in the world. It was always the plan to for him to launch on Tourmalet, and to try and have a gap… seems like it paid off.”
Yates even confessed to being surprised at exactly how big the gap to Vingegaard was, but like any good pro cyclist addressing the media, he made sure to remind reporters that “it’s never over till it’s over”.
“You can have bad days…” he added. “I think we just need to try not to make any mistakes and be calm. Hopefully we can recover the next two days and then we’ll see.”
Meanwhile Vingegaard and his team have been left licking their wounds and trying to square Pogačar’s performance on stage six with the Dane’s desire to win the Tour.
Yates was right, the Tour isn’t over till it’s over, but the rampaging Pogačar we saw today looks ever so familiar. He will take a lot to overcome.
