Jonas Vingegaard in effect sealed back-to-back wins in the Tour de France after defending his overall lead in the final mountain stage of the three-week race. With only Sunday’s processional stage to central Paris to come, the Dane will, barring accidents, wear the final yellow jersey on the Champs-Élysées.
In a duel that revisited the most intriguing days of this year’s Tour, Tadej Pogacar out-sprinted his Danish rival at Le Markstein, in the Vosges. Pogacar, whose overall challenge had collapsed midweek in the Alps, had been determined to end the Tour on a positive note.
“I finally feel like myself again,” he said. “It was good to feel good again, from start to finish, after many days of suffering.”
Vingegaard said: “I’m very happy to win my second Tour de France. It was my big goal of the year and once again I must thank my team a lot. I really appreciated the battle I had with Tadej. He’s a super great guy. It’s been an amazing fight since Bilbao.
“We knew my strengths and we knew how to get the best out of my strengths. Not everyone understood our plan, but we understood ourselves and in the end it paid off.
“The Tour is the biggest race in the world and it is something special. Probably, I will try to win it again next year.”
Pogacar’s resurgence came far too late to change the status quo, and with one of the biggest victory margins of the modern era, he was beaten overall by 7min 29sec, by a dominant Vingegaard. But he was boosted by seeing his UAE Team Emirates lieutenant Adam Yates finish third.
“I definitely came in with less pressure, both external and internal,” Yates said of his first podium finish in a Grand Tour. “The team knew I was good and maybe that helped a little with my consistency.
“I found my level and also it was a good ride as a team. It’s not easy to stay consistent over three weeks and we did a pretty good job.”
With Yates leading Pogacar into the final kilometre to set up his stage-winning sprint and his twin brother, Simon, climbing up the classification and claiming fourth overall, the Yates twins ended this Tour very much as they began it in Bilbao, riding together to the finish line.
The stage was marred by a series of crashes, with three riders in the top 10 – Carlos Rodríguez, Vingegaard’s key climbing lieutenant Sepp Kuss and Thibaut Pinot’s co-leader, David Gaudu – among the fallers.
The Ineos Grenadiers rider Rodríguez, bloodied on his left side and on his brow, fought hard to hang on to fourth place but on the final climb was unable to prevent Simon Yates from moving ahead of him overall.
Competing in his last Tour and riding on local roads, Pinot made good his promise to try to win the stage. His lone move was cheered on by thousands of fans, as “Pinotmania” gripped the Vosges.
The French rider, who said before the stage that “it would be hard to know these roads better than I do”, led the yellow jersey group, containing Vingegaard, by a minute and a half as he reached the top of the penultimate climb, the Petit Ballon.
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Three pursuers, including Tom Pidcock, chased Pinot to the foot of the Tour’s last mountain, the Col du Platzerwasel. But nine kilometres from the finish the Frenchman’s determination was no longer enough and after being swept up by Vingegaard, Pogacar and the Austrian climbing phenomenon Felix Gall he slipped behind.
Meanwhile, relations between Pinot’s Groupama-FDJ team and Vingegaard’s Jumbo-Visma lineup reached a new low after a row broke out between Vingegaard’s team manager, Richard Plugge, and Pinot’s manager, Marc Madiot.
Plugge, who has been active in recent days in pushing back against a wave of scepticism directed towards Vingegaard’s performances, said Madiot’s riders had been drinking alcohol during last Monday’s rest day, on the eve of the Tour’s pivotal time trial stage.
“We were with a French team at our hotel during the rest day. We could see riders drink large beers. Alcohol is poison and when you’re tired, it makes you more tired,” Plugge said.
Madiot reacted by saying: “Who does he think he is? It’s an exceptionally vile attack on his part. He should keep his mouth shut.”
The Frenchman said that rest day “get-togethers” were normal for his team. “I was at the table, there were Perriers,” Madiot said. “It’s shabby of Plugge – small and shabby.”
Plugge’s description of alcohol as poison also appeared to be at odds with Vingegaard’s own response to a question after stage 12 had finished in the Beaujolais region. “My wife and I enjoy a bottle of wine from time to time but, as a cyclist, not so often.”
