Key Takeaways: Tour de France Stage 14
Breaking down how a key mountain stage was won & how it pulled the overall classification into much clearer focus
After being set up with near-perfect execution of a bold plan for his UAE teammates, Tadej Pogačar stormed to victory atop the Pla d'Adet high in the rugged landscape of the Pyrenees on his way to opening a significant time gap on his closest rival Jonas Vingegaard and taking a major step toward winning a third Tour de France overall title. While most outside observers urged and expected Pogačar to play defense and force Vingegaard and his Visma team to attack as the race entered the high mountains, UAE instead drew up a bold plan to pace the early breakaway back to contest the stage win while having Adam Yates attack early on the final climb to force Visma to chase and stretch Vingegaard’s support team thin before Pogačar launched a vicious knockout attack that saw him drop and distance Vingegaard, extend his overall lead and drastically shift the momentum to his UAE team’s favor.
Stage Top Five
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +39
3) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) +1’10
4) Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Grenadiers) +1’19
5) Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) +1’23
Time Select GC Contenders Gained(+)/Lost(-) on the Stage:
Pogačar +0
Vingegaard -43
Evenepoel -1’16
Rodríguez -1’29
Ciccone -1’33
Almeida -1’41
Current GC Top Five:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +1’57
3) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +2’22
4) João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) +6’01
5) Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos-Grenadiers) +6'‘09
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Stage 14 Race Notebook
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152km-92km-to-go: The start of the stage once again features a furious fight for the breakaway. Interestingly, a group of sprinters, like Bryan Coquard and Arnaud De Lie go clear with Classics stars like Mathieu van der Poel and Oier Lazkano (presumably, the sprinters are here to get ahead of the peloton and make their day easier when they hit the big climbs, but having to ride that hard to stay clear throws that calculus into question). When a large group of mountain stage hunters, with riders like Ben Healy and Michał Kwiatkowski, take off in pursuit, Tadej Pogačar pulls over for a nature break, which forces the peloton to slow up and is the de facto signal that UAE is happy with the move.
88.9km: With the gap between the breakaway and the peloton hitting three minutes, UAE parks Nils Politt on the front to hold the gap steady in the long, slightly uphill valley before the Col du Tourmalet.
37.3km: Politt is impressively still on the front even after pulling up the Tourmalet. The breakaway still has a gap of three minutes, which is exactly what UAE wants since it is manageable enough to pull back on the final two climbs.
16.3km: Coming off the descent of the day’s second climb, Jonas Vingegaard is somewhat oddly sitting in third wheel behind UAE’s Marc Soler and Pavel Sivakov, with two Visma teammates behind him and Pogačar getting a better draft and easier ride, behind them. I suspect this could be due to Vingegaard not being comfortable on the descent, wanting to see the road ahead to choose his own line.
13km: As they approach the base of Pla d'Adet, Vingegaard has dropped back behind his team while Pogačar sits on his wheel.
9.2km: As the climb of Pla d'Adet starts, Ben Healy, who has attacked off the front of the breakaway, is 1’10 ahead. UAE has Pavel Sivakov on the front, setting pace to keep the gap to Healy under control, while Pogačar sits further back in the bunch with his bodyman Adam Yates behind Evenepoel and Vingegaard and their respective teams, while João Almeida is floating even further back.
8.3km: When Sivakov pulls off, with Healy’s gap holding steady at 1’11, Almeida comes forward just in time to take over the pacemaking, suggesting the team’s plan was for him to sit back in the draft and only come forward at this exact spot on the climb. Pogačar and Yates are still sitting further back in the field.
7.2km: After a brief chat with Pogačar, things get interesting when Adam Yates launches an unmarked attack as Almeida pulls off the front and retreats into the field. There is slight confusion about who will chase before Vingegaard’s Visma team comes to the front. This puts immense pressure on Visma’s last remaining resources, Matteo Jorgenson, who has to try to close the gap to Yates in an attempt to keep him from becoming a mid-attack stopover for Pogačar and/or soaking up precious time bonus seconds.
4.6km: Jorgenson has the gap down to 35 seconds just as Yates is about to catch Healy on the front. Pogačar, sensing the time gap, steep pitch, and upcoming flatter terrain suits him perfectly, launches an absolutely nuclear-speed attack. Jonas Vingegaard attempts to sprint into his slipstream, as we’ve seen him do countless times.
4.6km cont.: However, unlike previous times, as Pogačar keeps the power on the pedals, Vingegaard begins to stall and looks over his shoulder to see if reinforcements are coming from behind.
4.5km: This stalling allows Pogačar to pry open a 30-meter gap on Vingegaard, who has been joined by Evenepoel.
4.4km: Pogačar links up with Yates, meaning he has closed a 35-second gap in just 50 seconds. With Vingegaard and Evenepoel chasing 50 meters back, having Yates to pace him just as the gradient starts to ease off (which means the speed and benefit of draft increases) should allow him to keep Vingegaard from closing the gap as he did on Stage 10.
4km: After a few moments in Yates wheel, Pogačar surges ahead again as Vingegaard closes the gap down to 8 seconds and threatens to close the gap.
3km-1.8km: In the kilometer after leaving Yates, Pogačar only opens the gap on a hard-chasing Vingegaard by two additional seconds, giving him a ten-second advantage, but, in the next, faster kilometer, he pulls out ten additional seconds.
Finish: Pogačar storms through the line for the stage win and ten-second time bonus. Behind, Vingegaard rolls over the line, visibly exhausted and defeated, 39 seconds later. Remco Evenepoel rolls over in third 1’10 back with Carlos Rodríguez 1’19 back in 4th.
Three Key Takeaways
1) Despite Being Short-Handed, Tadej Pogačar & UAE Put on a Tactical Masterclass: At the start of the stage, UAE found themselves with their backs against the wall with the abandonment of one of their key riders, Juan Ayuso, and everyone saying a harder pace in the tough mountain stages to come would suit Jonas Vingegaard and penalize Tadej Pogačar. But, instead of minimizing downside by racing defensively, UAE bet on themselves and took a big swing by pacing over multiple mountain passes and cooking up a picture-perfect squeeze on Visma on the final climb.
The decision to have Adam Yates attack to pressure an already-weakened Visma team instead of simply lining Almeida and Yates up to set up a standard attack was a masterclass that netted the single biggest mountain stage time gain Pogačar has taken on Vingegaard since his biggest rival started winning Tours de France.
The major benefits of having Yates attack instead of sitting in the draft were that it forced Visma to exhaust their own resources to respond while Pogačar sat on and gave Pogačar much-needed extra speed when Vingegaard was in hot pursuit.
One thing to note is that UAE looking lean, mean, and wholly focused on the job at hand the day after losing a hugely important rider, Juan Ayuso, may not be a complete coincidence.
And UAE’s team strength aside, Pogačar’s individual level is the highest level we’ve ever seen from him at any point in his career. More important than winning and shattering Lance Armstrong’s record time on Pla d'Adet by two minutes, Pogačar’s raw numbers were 1,837 VAM over the last 25 minutes and an estimated average power of 6.9w/kg (443 watts) after a hard day of racing.
If accurate, this would be Pogačar’s best climbing performance of 2024 and potentially his entire career, especially when we adjust for the training load absorbed on the days before the effort.
2) The Pre Existing Cracks in Jonas Vingegaard & Visma-Lease a Bike Are Finally Starting to Show: With the race’s first truly brutal mountain stage and two weeks of racing now behind us, it is clear that the two-time defending champion and his team clearly aren’t at the same level that propelled them to victory through the last two editions.
After all, while Pogačar’s initial surge sometimes distances a fully fit Vingegaard, he is almost always able to close down the gap over the course of a minute or two. His inability to do so today, and allowing the gap to extend all the way to the finish line, confirms that his level simply isn’t at his best.
While closing down Pogačar’s attack back on Stage 10 was impressive, having to close down his rival meant he was dropped in the first place. We should also note that Vingegaard has been unable to claw his way back before the summit of a climb where Pogačar has attacked three times so far at this race.
To understand how unusual this is, consider that since Jonas Vingegaard finished second at the 2022 Tour de France, his two biggest single-day time losses to Tadej Pogačar have both come at this Tour via today’s 39-second gap and Stage 4’s 37-second loss.
Considering the training he missed due to his terrible crash this spring, these slight struggles make perfect sense and track what we saw last year with Pogačar’s disrupted training. Just like Pogačar in 2023, Vingegaard has produced individual-stage efforts capable of matching his best form, but cracks have begun to appear around two weeks into the race.
In last year’s Stage 14, Pogačar, who had a highly disrupted pre-Tour training schedule due to a broken wrist, was unable to drop Vingegaard on the Col de Joux Plane before being outfoxed and out-descended by Carlos Rodríguez, who took the stage win, and Vingegaard, who took time via time bonuses.
And, instead of being able to build form throughout the race, Pogačar got worse and worse relative to the better-prepared Vingegaard in 2023, and I would expect us to see this same trend in 2024.
Outside of Vingegaard’s slightly subpar form, the fact that his Visma does not have the depth or strength they’ve had in recent years presents major issues and will make it incredibly difficult to press UAE and Pogačar as they attempt to make back time.
For example, without a single non-Vingegaard rider able to put Almeida or Yates, let alone Pogačar, under pressure with their pacing, and no other GC contender within ten minutes of Pogačar, the ‘swarm’ strategy they’ve used in years past isn’t available.
3) The Eventual Winner of the Tour de France Was Likely Revealed Today. Due to the difficult nature of the stage and the long, consistently steep climbs that strip away almost any outside variables, I said before the stage that whoever won this stage would go on to win the Tour, and afterward, I feel the same way.
While pundits like to dig deep into the differences between different climbing stages and mountain ranges and how they suit different riders, the data increasingly supports the theory that stages with long, steep climbs ridden at an extremely hard pace simply benefit the strongest rider in the race.
And, instead of fading late in the race, these riders are usually able to extend and defend their gap on future climbing stages as a Grand Tour goes on.
Stage 15 Preview
Tomorrow’s 15th stage serves up a monster near 200-kilometer march through the Pyrenees from Loudenvielle to a summit finish at Plateau de Beille and features a leg-breaking 5,000 meters (16,000ft) of vertical gain. With a route this hard, especially a start on the 8% average gradient Col de Peyresourde, there is sure to be another GC showdown chasing down a strong early breakaway.
With Pogačar under no pressure to extend his gap outside of the stage-finishing sprint, UAE will likely sit back and force Visma to attempt to bring the race to them.
Unfortunately for Visma, it isn’t clear if they have the team and GC options to do this. While they could send Matteo Jorgenson into the early breakaway to pressure UAE, every other team of the GC contenders between Jorgenson in tenth and Pogačar in first would come forward to help UAE control the stage.
Additionally, with Jorgenson being one of the only riders Visma can count on to set up a Vingegaard attack on the final climb, they likely can’t afford to send him in the break.
Prediction: Ben Healy gets into the early breakaway yet again and takes a stage win after the GC group stalls out with no team having the firepower or will to take up the pace to challenge UAE, who are content to ride a defensive pace and set up Pogačar for a late attack on the final climb that nets a few seconds to add to his GC lead.