Tour de France favorites Jonas Wingegaard and Tadej Pogacar approached the finish almost on a par

This year’s premier multi-day road race, the Tour de France, is in for a perfect denouement. By the final week of the Tour, two favorites – Dane Jonas Vingegaard from Team Jumbo-Visma and Slovenian Tadej Pogacar from UAE Team Emirates – came up almost on a par: Wingegaard was ahead of the competitor by only ten seconds. Perhaps the decisive of the five remaining stages in this duel will be the Tuesday race with a separate start.

Sunday – the 15th – stage of the Tour de France between the Alpine towns of Les Gets and Saint-Gervais-les-Bains was won by the Dutchman Wout Pools, who plays for the Bahrain Victorious team. I won, by the way, very beautifully – running away from the peloton as part of a small group of riders, with an energetic margin in the end. But the directors of the Tour broadcast, even at the climactic moment for Puls, when it was decided whether he was ahead or not, they still constantly switched to cameras, closely watching what was happening in the distance, six and a half minutes from this exciting showdown of contenders for the podium. They showed a lagging behind peloton and two riders who, it seems, did not take their eyes off each other and repeated all the maneuvers one after another: one accelerated, the second picked up, one slowed down, the second also.

But everything is clear. Neither Wout Pools, nor those from whom he briskly escaped on the alpine climbs, are among the contenders for high places in the general classification.

And for the highest line in it are fighting only these two cyclists, constantly diverting the attention of television people from the Dutchman. And no one will be able to intervene in their duel for sure. It is, of course, about winner Tour 2020 and 2021 by Tadej Pogacar and beaten his summer 2022 Jonas Wingegaard.

No one doubted that they were the undisputed favorites of the current release of the great stage race long before it began: the tone gained in the spring is too good, the teams, on whose support a lot depends, are in order. But hardly anyone guessed how beautiful and stubborn this fight would be.

At the start of the Tour, Pogacar got a slight advantage. However, everything changed the fifth stage in the Pyrenees. On it, the Slovene failed, far away, for a whole minute, releasing Wingegor, it seems, solely because of a tactical miscalculation. Pogachar did not react to the attack of the Dane one and a half kilometers before the finish line, deciding to wait for his partners and hoping that with their help the chase would be easier, and did not guess: the enemy managed to escape.

Such blows, sometimes, become fatal. But then things got even more interesting. Tadej Pogacar already at the next stage showed that he had plenty of fuse, and with a jerk gobbled up half of the head start given to Jonas Vingegor. Then he bit him again.

On Sunday, Pogacar attacked again. This time, however, it did not work out to get away from Wingegor, but this does not change much.

The ten seconds remaining between the leaders at the top of the classification is an ephemeral gap by the standards of the big stage race. A break that promises the perfect ending to the Tour de France.

And it happens extremely rarely. Usually, by the final week, someone has already managed to create a solid margin of safety. And here – no stock. There is nothing strange in the fact that L’Equipe compared this Tour with the Tour of 1989: then two favorites – American Greg Lemond and Frenchman Laurent Fignon – also rode side by side all the time, and miserable seconds played in Lemond’s favor. Until now, that stage race has been something of a benchmark for velodrama. But Tour 2023 threatens to surpass her in this sense.

There are six more stages in his schedule, including two full-fledged mountain ones. But it is likely that the key one will still be the one that will take place immediately after the day allotted for recovery, on Tuesday. This is a 22.4 km time trial between Passy and Combloux. Cutting – after all, it is always a chance to recoup much more reliable than a stage with a general start.

At the same time, it is insanely difficult to choose which of the two main characters in front of her looks preferable. Pogachar was, of course, more aggressive in recent days. But this activity stemmed largely from his status as a catch-up. And a year ago, Vingegaard took over in their fight in the Tour de France cut-off. True, in 2022 it was the penultimate stage and before it the Dane’s reserve was already colossal.

Alexey Dospekhov