The winning moment? If Tadej Pogačar took the yellow jersey after just Stage 4, hopes of a contest were rekindled on Stage 11 Le Lioran when Jonas Vingegaard won. They were calmed on the first day in the Pyrenees to the Pla d’Adet, then extinguished the next day on the climb the Plateau de Beille. If not the winning moment this second day in the Pyrenees set up a dominant victory.
Pogačar’s imperious results will wow some and bore others and that’s fine, there are different ways to enjoy the sport. If the final result lacked suspense the daily battles to slip the UAE team’s stranglehold were gripping and many stages offered some of the best racing so far this season.
We can’t start the review in Rimini, we’ll go to Nice instead. Because in March both Primož Roglič and Remco Evenepoel were both caught out by Matteo Jorgenson, two “invincibles” undone in Paris-Nice.
Weeks later came disaster in the collective crashes in the Basque Country and Dwars Door Vlaanderen that left many injured and in rehab, but not Pogačar because he preparing for the Giro. Crashes like this make you wonder if teams only satisfied by major wins will retain stars for the grand tours and monuments even more.
It was in spring that the sounds from Pogačar’s entourage changed, the Giro was no longer the prime mission with anything in July as a bonus. Instead Giro-Tour double talk got loud, and long before the Trofeo Senza Fine was raised. Pogačar breezed the Giro, the route was eased and nobody apart from Antonio Tiberi could or would attack him. The result was six stages and almost ten minutes on the next rider.
With hindsight June counted too. Roglič won the Critérium du Dauphiné, just. We didn’t see it but Covid was back in bunch. Pogačar mentioned he caught it in June. Evenepoel didn’t mention it but apparently he was in his pre-Tour camp hotel room for days after the Dauphiné. Perhaps this gave them added immunity for July, or just meant their Covid karma was used up in June rather than July?
Here’s the chart of the GC standings over the 21 stages. Sometimes this can look like tangled wiring but 2024’s version has just four lines because the others in the top-10 were racing hard yet never weighing on the race. The lines hardly overlap and fall away from Pogačar at every big rendez-vous, Remco Evenepoel’s Beaujolais time trial win a rare inflection.
Roglič is included if only to show that finishes where he might have hoped to pick up bonuses saw him lose out so we can only speculate as to what might have been if it wasn’t for Alexey Lutsenko and that traffic divider in La Sauvetat-sur-Lede. A contest for the third place perhaps but to ask for more feels greedy.
Le Lioran saw the “tipping point theory” gain traction: Pogačar would start to fade and Vingegaard was on the up. Pogačar’s attack on the Puy Mary saw him away although never alone given the crowds. Only Vingegaard floated across on the next climb and then won the stage. The turning point? Pogačar looked pale and it seemed less a reversal of fortunes and more a quirk to see him lose a sprint. Vingegaard needed more than the four second time bonus advantage.
The hypothesis took a hit on the first day in the Pyrenees when Pogačar took 39 seconds on the climb to Pla d’Adet. Still subscribers could claim the upper slopes were not so steep and that Vingegaard maybe just had a bad day.
The Plateau de Beille settled things. Visma-LAB worked hard all day and you could tell a Vingegaard attack was coming. Once Matteo Jorgenson could do no more the Dane went with 10km to go, standing on the pedals for 18 strokes. Pogačar followed, seated. The others were gone, as if written out of the script. Vingegaard hardly asked Pogačar for a turn and this had the effect of keeping Evenepoel at bay. With 5km to to Pogačar made a quick acceleration and was gone, taking a minute by the finish line. Goodbye and goodnight.
The hierarchy established it was then entrenched. Superdévoluy was the exception that proved the rule, a judder as here Evenepoel took time on Pogačar and Vingegaard but just ten seconds. This was no roller coaster contest of ups and downs.
The dominance continued. Visma’s plans for Vingegaard over the Bonette pivoted to a Jorgenson stage win but they were caught trying to ride two horses and Pogačar rode down a four minute lead on the climb to Isola 2000. The next day to La Couillole saw Pogačar broadcast UAE would take it easier, only for Soudal-Quickstep to chase and so what else could Pogačar do but out-sprint Vingegaard? The gaps only widened in the final time trial where the 1-2-3 results on the day reflected the podium, a sixth stage win for Pogačar and a six minute winning margin.
The Verdict
A dominant performance where Pogačar has improved after his sacking in Combloux and the Col de la Loze last year, such that even a fully fit Vingegaard must find it hard to plot a path to victory next July. He’s bound to try and Evenepoel is keen to return too but all the rest must be wondering what to do.
Fourth place went to João Almeida, the first of four sherpas in the top-10 and he was 10 minutes behind Evenepoel. The best challenger was Carlos Rodriguez, six minutes down on Almeida and 7th overall.
This edition doesn’t pass the “DVD test” where once upon a time you’d buy the video highlights – and even a DVD player – to soak it up again and again over winter. This time things worked out so one way and there was little contest on the GC. The podium order was settled and the rest of the top-10 felt incidental.
Yet it was full of blockbuster moments and for hours at a time. This was a rewarding race to watch live in full rather than the evening highlights because the action came in the duration, hours of relentless battle to get into the breakaways.
The daily battle for many of the stages was great. Who had Agen-Pau down as a barnstormer when the route came out? We got romance and pathos, Romain Bardet taking the yellow jersey in his last Tour, Biniam Girmay’s first Tour win, Vingegaard in tears at his come-back stage win, and Mark Cavendish of course. The Tour is obviously the biggest bike race going, it’s what this brings that makes it the best. Most of the top riders are there, they’re in peak shape and racing hard just to get in the breakaway.
Not every day was a barnstormer. The sprint stages are becoming a structural problem if nobody attacks. The race can still satisfy roadside crowds and these off-days allow riders to regenerate, reculer pour mieux sauter but an active recovery ride does not make for great viewing. This blog’s daily previews gently steer readers to tune in late but that’s hardly something the organisers and participants can suggest.
It’s not easy to remedy, France’s geography means everything to the left of the line traced from from Biarritz to Strasbourg is more or less flat. The Troyes gravel worked, the GC contenders taking part in the action only to leave the win to the break. France has plenty of other off-road options if the organisers need them.
The 2025 Tour de France starts in the North and should visit Brittany meaning they might employ pavés or ribins, and maybe a team time trial with “Paris-Nice” rules with an uphill finish at, say, Mûr-de-Bretagne.
Reprising the DVD test again, to rewatch is to know Pogačar keeps winning but each day this wasn’t a given. Four minutes starting the climb to Isola 2000? It was only well into the climb that the result started to feel inevitable with Pogačar harvesting riders up the road like some demented threshing machine. Still most mountain stages often lacked the “two for the price of one” contests with the breakaway reeled in. UAE went in looking very strong, a podium clean sweep was possible but instead they finished fourth and sixth, in part because Adam Yates and João Almeida were always riding for their leader and not themselves.
The Tour had its annual doping hearings. Each July the best rider has to account for their performances as parts of the the media evoke “doubts” and “questions”, but little else. The questions are formulaic, seem to be happen every July and come in particular once the GC hierarchy is established and are inevitably directed at the race leader, anyone else with a transformational performance during the race seems spared. As such it feels like ritual rather than enquiry. Yes record performances and 7W/kg for 40 minutes ought to invite questions and debate but it’s almost a Rorschach test where what people see can inform us more about their state than the sport. Your blogger is left guessing rather than sitting in fist-clenched certainty.
Talking of spoilsports and uncertainty, Covid. To labour the point made before, it’s no longer a health emergency but it is contagious and can be ruinous for athletes, a Damoclean protein spike waiting to fall at random. In the end it didn’t reshape the race but it did contribute to Ineos and others having a discreet time.
The mountains competition was the opposite of recent years where we’d seen a lively contest between riders quashed late in the third week by a GC rider taking the jersey on their way to the overall win. This time Richard Carapaz took the jersey off Tadej Pogačar, no mean feat and he ends up as a worthy winner who thrived this Tour and aided by clever team work. Jonas Abrahamsen needs to be mentioned too for his indefatigable antics in the first half of the race, Uno-X are still the only team in the race without a stage win but they brought plenty by trying.
Carapaz makes for an instructive exemplar, a grand tour contender now almost in a cameo role. Bardet pulled this off too. Simon Yates, Enric Mas and Jai Hindley are similar but without a result which shows even this class of rider can’t guarantee results.
For all the dominance by UAE there was still room for surprise and the little guys. Anthony Turgis won a stage, Arkéa-B&B Hotels got their first ever too thanks to Kévin Vauquelin. Biniam Girmay was no revelation but he himself said he started out as Gerben Thijssen’s leadout but a mix-up in the approach to Turin saw him grab the opportunity to win. He took two more and with it the green jersey in a contest that was validated by Jasper Philipsen’s late challenge and given a scare by Girmay’s crash in Nîmes. The sprint shock was Mark Cavendish in Saint-Vulbas but the result was convincing, if it was hard to see him doing it suddenly with 200m to it seemed irresistible.
For Pogačar what next? The Worlds and no Vuelta, no Olympics either. He and his team are in search of new challenges, winning Milan-Sanremo is one but famously elusive and Paris-Roubaix features too but not yet as his team will want him back at the Tour and without too many extra kilos please. Peter Sagan’s career is interesting, the thrill of fresh challenges soon gave way to delivering for sponsors, with each passing year you could see him turn from thrill seeker to corporate mannequin as sponsors expected a cobbled classic and the green jersey. Monday’s Le Monde suggests Pogačar has 12 million reasons a year not to retire yet but even that may not retain him if the fun fades.
Was Vingegaard missing form? He said he was producing some of his best numbers although this was at the finish line, informed by saccadic glances from his bike computer rather than poring over power files. His team said he was lacking some muscle which made him less explosive when he needed to jump. He is bound to want to come back and with a stronger team in support too given all their bad luck must be used up soon.
Can Evenepoel improve on his third place? To ask this is to set a new question no sooner after he answered the one about being able to handle multiple mountain stages in the third week. Beating both Pogačar and Vingegaard looks out of reach today but he’s now able to look ahead and imagine what a perfect preparation would look like. No crash in April, no crash-diet in June, no Covid, stronger team mates and he can hope for more.
Finally while it’s all done and dusted, the sense of wanting it all to start again. The 2025 Tour de France route presentation is on Tuesday 29 October but before then the Olympics and the Tour de France Femmes. A long summer in France will do instead.