Key Takeaways: Tour de France Stage 14
Breaking down how a brutally hard alpine stage was won and what it means for the still razor-thing GC battle
Carlos Rodríguez, the young Spanish star on Ineos, rode with wisdom far exceeding his 22 years of age by unleashing a picture-perfect downhill attack on the lead group and gliding down the incredibly technical descent into the picturesque alpine town of Morzine to win a brutal mountain stage and move into third place overall. The stage, which, after a series of early crashes that took down a large portion of the peloton and caused a brief neutralization of the stage, saw Jonas Vingegaard’s Jumbo team shred the peloton with an excruciatingly hard pace in an attempt to set up an attack on the difficult final climb of the Col de Joux Plane.
True to form, Tadej Pogačar attempted to spoil Jumbo’s party by unleashing another impressive acceleration with nearly four kilometers of steep climbing remaining. However, for one of the first times in his career, the two-time Tour winner wasn’t able to deliver a knockout blow once he launched his attack, and was reeled in by Vingegaard, who then won the sprint over Pogačar for the coveted time bonuses at the top of the climb. Despite missing out on the time bonuses at the top of the climb, with the two riders free and clear by a large margin, Pogačar appeared to have the stage win in hand. However, a tactical battle between the two rivals, which saw them reduce their pace to a near crawl on the short plateau before beginning the plunge into Morzine, allowed Rodríguez to catch, pass, and expertly gap the two leaders just as the descent was beginning. Once the talented young rider was able to pry open a multi-second lead, Pogačar was unable to close down the move due to some unusually clumsy descending, which allowed Rodríguez to take the biggest win of his young career.
When the dust finally settled on the stage, Vingegaard had pulled out an additional second on Pogačar to extend his overall lead to 10 seconds, while Rodríguez was able to move into third place overall by a single second ahead of Jai Hindley, and outside podium contenders like Simon Yates and Tim Pidcock lost massive chunks of time.
Stage Top Three
1) Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos) +0
2) Tadej Pogačar (UAE) +5
3) Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo) +5
Stage GC Gaps:
Rodríguez +0
Vingegaard -5
Pogačar -6
A.Yates -22
Kuss -1’09
Hindley -1’58
S.Yates -3’33
Pidcock -8’52
Current GC Top Five:
1) Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo) +0
2) Tadej Pogačar (UAE) +10
3) Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos) +4’43
4) Jai Hindley (Bora) +4’44
5) Adam Yates (UAE) +5’20
Stage 14 Race Notebook
147km-to-go: Just a few kilometers into the stage, a massive crash on the wet roads cause the stage to be paused for 30 minutes due to medical staff not being able to attend to every rider needing medical attention. Romain Bardet is the biggest name that is forced to drop out due to the crash. Jai Hindley crashes but continues on.
40.5km: Jumbo-Visma, who has been setting a blistering pace on the front and keeping a breakaway from getting any real distance since the re-start, reduces the peloton to just a handful of riders on the climb, and descent, of the Col de la Ramaz climb with a massive pull from Wout van Aert.
23.4km: Jumbo continues to lead the peloton into the base of the Col de Joux Plane climb, likely in an effort to take the sting off Pogačar’s inevitable attack.
23km: UAE has Rafał Majka come to the front to increase the pace and shake a few of the Jumbo domestiques loose. Van Aert is almost immediately dropped due to the pace increase. Interestingly, Sepp Kuss gets on the radio almost immediately, which is perhaps him warning his teammates not to be disrupted by the short-lived pace increase.
21.8km: Van Aert, after coming to a near stop after pulling off, miraculously claws his way back to the front and drops Majka, leaving UAE with little firepower to deploy on the rest of the climb.
16.7km: Pogačar’s last domestique, Adam Yates, takes over pacemaking from Sepp Kuss, who is dropped with Ineos’ Carlos Rodríguez. This is likely to make the pace hard, and isolate Vingegaard, to set up a Pogačar attack on the toughest upper portions of the climb.
15.7km: Pogačar launches a powerful attack off Yates’ pace. Vingegaard initially follows the move.
15.5km: However, after a few moments, we see the now familiar sight of Vingegaard falling off the wheel of Pogačar when the Slovenian goes into turbo mode. He is roughly 20 meters, or two seconds, back.
15.3km-13.6km: Despite losing the initial distance, Vingegaard is able to stabilize the gap to Pogačar, and, eventually, reel in Pogačar. This may be the first time in Pogačar’s career that he hasn’t been able to stick a long-range attack.
12.5km: Vingegaard makes a massive mistake by passing Pogačar and going to the front. This leaves him vulnerable to attacks since he can’t see Pogačar winding up to go. However, he is saved from this mistake by the camera motos, who block Pogačar when he finally does launch an attack, which allows Vingegaard to get back on terms.
12km: Vingegaard recovers from his initial mistake by sitting on Pogačar before launching a well-timed, and positioned, sprint to take the eight bonus seconds at the top of the climb. By waiting to attack Pogačar until the bend in the road, and by hugging the inside line, Vingegaard leaves Pogačar the wide line around the right as his only option to come by him.
9.2km-5.7km: Vingegaard, learning from his earlier mistake, stays on Pogačar’s wheel on the tricky false flat over the top of the Joux Plane. Pogačar, not wanting to expose himself to an attack, refuses to pull, so the two riders are caught by Adam Yates and Rodríguez, who were over a minute behind with a kilometer left on the climb. While Yates rides right to the back of the group, Rodríguez makes an incredibly smart decision of going directly to the front and opening a slight gap on the right-hand corner into the descent, and is able to blow this slight gap into a nearly 10-second gap on Pogačar by the middle of the descent.
800m: Vingegaard, who wants Rodríguez to win to take the 10-second time bonus at the finish line, sits on Pogačar, who was descending incredibly slowly (even clumsily). Instead of attempting to jump over to Rodríguez when the road goes up slightly inside the final kilometer, Pogačar sits up to wait for Adam Yates, which kills any momentum the group had and seals the stage for Rodríguez.
Finish: Pogačar eventually attempts to sprint across the gap to win the stage, but the move comes too late and Rodríguez is able to easily hold off the duo to win the stage by five seconds and go into third place overall by a single second. Vingegaard comes in right behind Pogačar, only losing two seconds in finish-line time bonus seconds and extending his overall lead by one second due to his net time bonus gain throughout the stage.
Key Takeaways
1) Carlos Rodríguez’s savvy performance shows he is a very serious grand tour star of the future
The 22-year-old (the second youngest rider in the race) on Ineos racked up the British team’s second straight win in as many days with an incredibly savvy move at the top of the Joux Plane.
Despite being younger than all three other riders with him, Rodríguez appeared to be the wily veteran by using a well-timed catch, overtake, and right-hand turn maneuver to create an initial gap.
Once he had the gap due to a slight mistake from Pogačar to let his wheel go, Rodríguez unleashed unbelievably good descending skills on an extremely sketchy downhill to grab the stage win and make a massive move up the overall rankings into third place overall.
He may have been dropped on the final climb by the two top GC riders, but, Rodríguez’s ability to reel them in before carving down the descent for the stage win was hugely impressive and, considering this is only his second career grand tour, made him look like a bonafide contender to win a Tour de France title in the near future.
One oddity of Rodríguez’s rapid rise is the ambiguity around his future team. While one might think Ineos would be tripping over themselves to lock down the only young rider on their squad who appears capable of competing for a future Tour de France title, Rodríguez is currently out of contract for the coming season and is reportedly in talks to sign with Movistar.
Perhaps this stage win was enough to convince Ineos that they need to back up the Brinks Truck and pay Rodríguez whatever he is asking for, and then some.
2) The Tadej Pogacar/Jonas Vingegaard battle is stuck in lockstep, which means this Tour de France GC battle could come down to razor-thin margins
Outside of Rodríguez expertly stealing the stage win, the big story of the day has to be the fact that Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar finished with no time gaps between them on one of the hardest Tour de France stages in modern history.
In the end, despite hours of pace-making and work from his Jumbo-Visma team in an attempt to crack Pogačar, Vingegaard only gained a single net second due to a time bonus differential.
With no on-road time gaps being forced open between these two riders on such a hard stage, it is getting tough to imagine where time gaps could come from.
Perhaps this was simply the first stage of a multi-stage Jumbo ‘extreme fatigue’ strategy, but, with the way things currently stand, it is difficult to imagine where any significant on-road time gaps can come from.
This means that there is a very good chance the fight for the overall comes down to the time trial, or, assuming small margins there due to the near-identical form between the two riders, stage-win/time bonus sprints.
In theory, this would give the advantage to Pogačar due to his superior explosiveness. But, with a 10-second deficit and today’s opportunity to win the stage slipping through his fingers, Pogačar will now have to capitalize on every opportunity to win stages/take small chunks of time.
3) Jumbo’s bold, and polarizing tactics on the stage potentially served a valuable purpose
Considering they burned their entire team, along with the entire peloton, through the stage to allow Vingegaard to take time on Pogačar, yet only ended up taking a single second by the finish line, it would be easy to criticize Jumbo's tactics on the day.
However, before doing so, there are two key things to point out:
1) We will never know how much Pogačar could have taken on Vingegaard had the stage been easier and Jumbo allowed the ultra-explosive rider to arrive at the final kilometer of the Joux Plane completely fresh.
2) We don’t yet know if the physical load that Jumbo forced on Pogačar throughout the day will keep Pogačar from taking time on tomorrow’s uphill finish and allow Vingegaard to take time in the time trial.
Since Pogačar has distanced Vingegaard every time the two have arrived at a steep climb after a fairly subdued pace, it is safe to assume Vingegaard wouldn’t have been able to reel in a fresh Pogačar. If we assume this, we have to conclude that Jumbo’s bold decision was likely the correct one.
4) Pogačar and his UAE team had an extremely weird day
In some ways, having their rival GC team work all day but only take a single second on their leader was extremely positive and set them up well for the overall title at this Tour.
But, viewed through another lens, this stage was a complete disaster for UAE.
Instead of having Pogačar sit on Vingegaard before outsprinting him for the Joux Plane time bonus, and then pull over the top and taking the stage win, and more time bonuses, in a two-up sprint, they lost maximum time bonuses at the top of the Joux Plane to Vingegaard and lost the stage win due to Pogačar losing focus when Rodríguez reeled them in.
The delta between the time they lost to Vingegaard (-1 seconds), and what they would have taken in the above scenario (+7 seconds) is eight seconds.
This means their slight mistakes in the final few kilometers of the stage cost them time equal to 88% of the GC gap at the beginning of the stage (9 seconds).
People may scoff at a loss of 8 seconds, but, it is important to note that the most recent grand tour (Giro d’Italia) was decided by just 14 seconds.
5) This was an almost impossibly hard stage
It was easy to see that this was difficult by simply watching the Jumbo-led peloton keep an extremely strong breakaway at a gap of just 20 seconds and dwindle the front group down to just a handful of riders with over 40 kilometers remaining.
But, when we look at the numbers, specifically that the stage winner completely a 150+ kilometer mountain stage through one of the toughest routes of the Tour in under four hours, and hearing from riders that Jumbo pulled at an average of 5.5w/kgs on the climbs (420 watts for a 165-pound rider) on every climb throughout the stage, and 6w/kgs (450 watts for a 165-pound rider) on the final climb of the Joux Plane, the sheer absurdity of how hard this stage was begins to come into focus.
Stage 15 Preview
Tomorrow’s stage serves up another tough day in the Alps, with the peloton taking on a 180-kilometer route that finishes up the deceptively difficult Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc climb.
It is difficult to tell what Vingegaard’s Jumbo team will want to, or be capable of, do during the stage, but, with this route serving up one of the last great chances for Pogačar to take time from Vingegaard on a fairly low-altitude and punchy uphill finish, it is safe to assume they will sit back and hope the breakaway builds up a large advantage and takes the time bonus seconds on offer.
With this in mind, Pogačar’s UAE team will likely want to set a hard pace to control the breakaway and take the stage win and time bonuses.
However, considering their last attempt at this (stage 13), failed miserably, this certainly isn’t a guaranteed GC day.
Great that the small difference between Vingegaard and Pogacar has resulted in aggressive racing. Those two and their teams could just ride defensively and wait for the time trial or the Stage 20 climbs to make a difference. That's what we saw in the Giro this year. Credit to Jumbo and UAE for wanting to go for the big blow.
Can’t wait for tomorrow’s stage!