The rivalry between the defending Tour de France champion, Jonas Vingegaard, and his closest rival, Tadej Pogacar, is set to reach boiling point on the steep slopes of the Grand Colombier, overlooking the Rhone, on Friday.
After another stage characterised by some early sparring between the two race favourites and their teams, eventually won by the Basque rider Ion Izagirre, there remains nothing to choose between the pair.
On the eve of the Tour’s third mountain-top finish, the race for the maillot jaune is finely balanced. On a climb as severe as the “beyond category” Grand Colombier, with a 17km ascent at an average gradient of 7%, Vingegaard’s 17sec lead on Pogacar is wafer thin.
Vingegaard, of the Jumbo-Visma team, and the UAE Emirates team leader, Pogacar, both insist they are feeling “better and better” as the race goes on, but there is growing tension in their duel.
Pogacar famously humiliated the Dane’s Jumbo-Visma team in the dramatic denouement of the 2020 Tour, unseating Vingegaard’s teammate Primoz Roglic in the penultimate time trial stage to take his first yellow jersey in Paris.
Vingegaard continues to maintain his composure but, as the gap between them narrows, the pressure to prevent the unpredictable Slovenian from pulling off another coup is growing. Speaking after the stage to Belleville, the defending champion again kept his cards close to his chest.
Asked if he thought the Grand Colombier was better suited to him or Pogacar, he was noncommittal. “It’s a very hard climb,” he said. “It’s also super-long. It’s always hard to say before. It depends on who’s feeling good and who’s not. If you feel great, you try – if not, you wait.”
While it seems almost inevitable that Pogacar will seek to maintain his momentum and to narrow the gap on the race leader even further, the Dane seemed untroubled.
“I’m just happy where I am at the moment,” Vingegaard said. “I don’t think about who has the momentum, I just think about myself. You can have a plan to be attacking, but if you don’t have the legs it doesn’t really matter.”
Izagirre, riding for Cofidis, won stage 12 after a solo attack in the final 30km. It was his team’s second success in this year’s Tour, after the French rider Victor Lafay’s win in San Sebastián on stage two.
After another frantic opening to the stage, in which multiple riders fought to escape the peloton, the race eventually settled down, but only after almost 80km of attacking, with two main groups battling for control of the situation.
The leading group of 15 riders, including Izagirre, entered the triptych of hills, the cols of the Casse Froide, Croix Montmain and Croix Rosier, leading to the finish in Belleville, with a three-and-a-half-minute lead on a second group of 39 that included Vingegaard, Pogacar and their main rivals.
In the front group of 15, the French favourites Thibaut Pinot of Groupama FDJ, and Julian Alaphilippe, riding for Soudal Quickstep, were aware they would need to drop the fast finishers Mads Pedersen, of Lidl-Trek, and Jasper Philipsen’s Alpecin Deceuninck teammate Mathieu van der Poel to have any hope of a stage win.
But Izagirre’s stealth and cunning went under the radar and, as the numbers in the lead group dwindled, the 34-year-old broke clear on the final climb, the Col de la Croix Rosier, to take the second Tour stage win of his career. The group containing Vingegaard and Pogacar came in a little over four minutes later, with no significant changes to the top places in the general classification.
Of the peloton’s big names, the main beneficiary of the day was the climbing specialist Pinot, who leapfrogged five positions in the GC to 10th, six minutes behind the defending champion, with the Jura and the Alps coming into view. Racing in his last Tour, Pinot may yet prove an influential figure.
