Every second counts in the 2023 Tour de France, as the defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard, and his closest rival, Tadej Pogacar, again demonstrated as they fought their way through the Alps, scrapping over bonus seconds on stage 14, from Annemasse to Morzine.
They both huffed, puffed and sweated buckets, but there was ultimately little change to the gap between them, although it was a better day for Vingegaard, leader of the Jumbo-Visma team, who reined in his UAE Team Emirates rival’s attack near the top of the steep Col de Joux Plane to take the available bonus himself.
“Tadej had a very strong attack,” Vingegaard said of their race to the top of the Joux Plane, “and I had to do my own tempo. Luckily, it was enough to catch back to him.”
That effort widened the gap again, only for it to close once more on the nerve-racking descent to Morzine, where Pogacar sprinted ahead to snatch the bonus seconds for second place. The net gain after all that effort, however, was Vingegaard’s – a single second after 150km of racing over five mountain passes.
“I gained one second,” the Dane said, deadpan. “Now I’m 10 seconds ahead.” Asked if he viewed himself as the “moral winner” of the latest bout of sparring with Pogacar, Vingegaard retained his sangfroid. “We’re happy with how we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t think about who’s the ‘moral winner’.”
Just ahead of the sparring pair, Ineos Grenadiers took their second Tour de France win in 48 hours as Carlos Rodríguez, riding his debut Tour, followed Michal Kwiatkowski’s success at the summit of the Grand Colombier with a solo victory.
Watched by the team principal, Sir Dave Brailsford, making a rare visit to the Tour, Rodríguez had attacked at the start of the descent from the Joux Plane, sped through the tight bends, and held off Pogacar and Vingegaard to win the stage.
Brailsford, whose arrival at the race coincided with two stage wins for his team, enthused about the 22-year-old’s performance. “It’s his first Tour, and he’s riding a brilliant race,” Brailsford said. “On the descent, he was willing to take more of a risk than they were.”
But as Rodríguez flourished, climbing to third overall in the General Classification, his teammate Tom Pidcock was one of those suffering from the aftermath of a mass crash earlier in the stage. After only 8km, the pile-up forced a neutralisation, when about 50 riders either fell or were held up by the ensuing chaos. With medical teams treating riders in several teams, the peloton paused for almost 25 minutes as replacement ambulances joined the convoy.
Less than half an hour later, Romain Bardet, leader of Team DSM-Firmenich, and the British rider James Shaw, of EF Education-EasyPost, were both forced to abandon after crashes on the descent of the Col de Saxel. The French rider, forced out of the 2020 Tour with concussion, again seemed unsteady on his feet and was unable to continue.
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Pidcock lost contact with the favourites group, containing Pogacar and Vingegaard, 1km from the top of the Col de la Ramaz, the penultimate climb in a brutal stage.
In what was a rude retort to talk of a top-five finish in Paris, Pidcock never saw the front of the race again. He lost almost nine minutes on the stage, dropping to 11th place overall on the Tour’s General Classification.
“Hopefully he keeps on working at it,” Brailsford said. “I think he’s shown enough to show that this is really worth investing in. He can be up there with the best, I’m sure of it.”
Meanwhile, Brailsford, on the Tour for a long weekend, was not inclined to shed any further light on the bid by Ineos’s owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, to take control of Manchester United. “We are bound by pretty stringent NDAs [non-disclosure agreements],” he said, “but the interest is ongoing.”
