Key Takeaways: Tour de France Stage 4

Breaking down how an early Alpine stage produced a thrilling stage win & set the GC hierarchy

After a day of nearly non-stop climbing, as the peloton tracked across the Alps for its first glimpse of France, Tadej Pogačar unleashed an unanswerable attack on the upper slopes of the massive and unforgiving Col du Galibier, before riding clear for a solo win in Valloire that saw him take valuable time on every other GC contender, as well as reclaim the Yellow Jersey. While Jonas Vingegaard initially appeared to be able to respond to the move, Pogačar cracked him with a few hundred meters remaining on the climb before slicing down the descent to blow open his time gap from just a few seconds at the summit to over half a minute at the finish. After being reeled in by an elite chase group, Vingegaard faded, losing two seconds to Remco Evenepoel, who had to chase on late after being dropped on the descent before winning the sprint for second, Juan Ayuso in third, and Primož Roglič, who performed an incredible feat by finishing in the first chase group despite being dropped on the day’s first climb. With such an imperious Pogačar being closely followed by a phalanx of elite riders, the stage teased what could end up being an incredible Tour de France.

Stage Top Five:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) +35
3) Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) +35
4) Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +35
5) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +37

Current GC Top Five:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +45
3) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +50
4) Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) +1’10
5) Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +1’14

Time Select GC Contenders Gained(+)/Lost(-) On the Stage:
Pogačar +0
Evenepoel -45
Ayuso -49
Vingegaard -50
Roglič -53
Rodríguez -55
Almeida -1’11
Bernal -3’00
A. Yates -3’00

Stage 4 Race Notebook

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123.3km-120km-to-go: With a 40km climb out of the gate and an intermediate sprint point positioned on the early slopes, the stage starts off so hard and with so many splits as the peloton scrambled to close down breakaway moves that GC contenders like Primož Roglič and Egan Bernal are briefly dropped and forced to chase back to the front group. Mads Pedersen beats Biniam Gimary at the sprint as he continues to increase his lead on Jasper Philipsen and close the gap to Jonas Abrahamsen, who has held on impressively well.

109.1km: After endless attacks and chasing from the peloton, a strong move led by Mathieu van der Poel and Oier Lazkano finally rip off the front (this is impressive, but their odds of staying clear on the Galibier against a GC showdown behind are so slim it made me wonder why they are spending energy doing this).

26.2km: After they make the turn off the Col du Lautaret and onto the Galibier, UAE’s incredibly hard pace reels in Lazkano, the last man standing from the breakaway.

24.3km: After UAE burns through all of their true domestiques, things get interesting when they start a unique ‘rotating’ strategy of sending each of their three remaining non-Pogačar riders to the front to pull before being relieved by a teammate before they ride to complete exhaustion to preserve their GC placings. This creates a blistering pace that puts Pogačar’s rivals under pressure and dispatches outside contenders like Simon Yates and Tom Pidcock, the Yellow Jersey wearer Richard Carapaz, and Jonas Vingegaard’s last Visma teammate Matteo Jorgenson.

22km: Almeida, who is setting a very fast pace that is dropping Remco Evenepoel’s final teammate, Mikel Landa, and Primož Roglič, looks back and sees that his teammate Juan Ayuso, who he likely assumed had been dropped since he hadn’t been coming forward to take, is sitting at the back while he rides for Pogačar, who is getting less of a draft than he could be getting into a stiff headwind.

22km: This discovery set off a fairly shocking outburst. Both Almeida and Pogačar looked back in disbelief and began screaming at Ayuso and into their radios for him to come forward and work (even more shocking is that it isn’t the first time on this climb that Pogačar had to radio back to the team car to get Ayuso to come forward and do his job).

21.7km: After being forced to the front, Pogačar now has prime position with two teammates, plus his main rival, Jonas Vingegaard, in front of him on the headwind climb as he bides his time and waits for the final steep kilometer to attack.

19.7km: When the gradients kick up to 9%, Pogačar launches an extremely strong attack. Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel respond while the others don’t even bother changing their pace.

19.6km: Vingegaard yet again impressively closes down Pogačar, but his positioning in front of Pogačar on the climb allowed Pogačar to open up enough of a gap that Vingegaard has to spend 100 meters fighting to get into the slipstream. Evenepoel is just behind.

19.4km: 500 meters from the summit, Pogačar finally rides Vingegaard off his wheel with a strong second surge.

19km: At the summit, Pogačar takes the eight-second time bonus while putting six seconds into Vingegaard, 12 seconds on Evenepoel, and a whopping 33 seconds on Roglič in just a few hundred meters.

18.9km: Coming over the top, Vingegaard is still only seven seconds back but looks absolutely empty and immediately begins hemorrhaging time, with Pogačar quickly doubling his gap to 8-seconds.

18.2km-14km: Through the technical upper slopes of the descent, which has a significant amount of water due to the melting snow, Pogačar goes relatively slow compared to Vingegaard, who starts taking back time. Meanwhile, Evenepoel loses time before being caught and dropped by a chasing group of dropped riders.

4.6km-3.9km: Once they hit the less technical, power-based portion of the descent, Pogačar blows open the gap to 30+ seconds. Behind, the Ayuso, Roglič, and Rodríguez reel in a fading Vingegaard, while Evenepoel uses his aero profile and incredible fitness to catch back on.

Finish: Pogačar, clearly dialed in on taking as much time as possible, rides as hard as possible through the finish line before celebrating and taking ten bonus seconds.

Chase Group Finish: 35 seconds behind, Evenepoel powerfully leads the group over for six time bonus seconds, with Ayuso in third and Roglič pulling out 4th due to a hugely impressive recovery. Vingegaard, who is clearly struggling, loses two seconds to the group.

Three Key Takeaways

1) Tadej Pogačar Has Taken Serious Time So Far On Stages Designed to Limit Time Gains: The narrative around Tadej Pogačar has been somewhat negative, even suggesting that he has somehow disappointed through the first four stages. But if we stand back and look at the raw numbers, the two-time Tour de France winner has taken significant time on his GC rivals through terrain not particularly suited to producing major GC time gaps. And, if today’s final climb wasn’t into a headwind, and Pogačar’s team was more dialed in, the gaps could have been even more significant.

• The fact that he went incredibly deep with an anaerobic attack at a high altitude after an extremely long climb (where he is supposed to struggle) and put six seconds into his biggest rival and half a minute to others into a headwind over just a few hundred meters should be a sign of his superiority.

  • Perhaps an even more important data point is the time he continued to pull out time on Jonas Vingegaard up and over the climb and on the descent. This is significant since the stretch of road directly following a climb is where fitness differences between riders can be most exposed.

    • Interestingly, if this was a standard summit finish, Pogačar’s time gaps would have been far less pronounced, and we would have had a completely different perspective of the difference between Pogačar and Vingegaard.

• There is a long way to go in this Tour de France and plenty of riders at an extremely high level, so we certainly can’t call this race yet, but with Pogačar clearly, at such a high level personally and having by far the strongest team, he has to be considered the favorite to continue taking time on the others.

2) Pogačar’s Strong UAE Team Is a Massive Advantage, But Disruptive Dynamics Have Already Emerged: The incredibly high pace Pogačar’s UAE set on the Galibier was key to exposing riders with any underlying fitness shortcomings and making the race as selective as possible so Pogačar could create time gaps with his attack. This luxury of having the strongest team in the race will certainly help Pogačar throughout the three weeks, but the strange dynamics created by having such a strong squad are already presenting slight issues.

• While UAE has four riders placed in the top 13 in the GC, Pogačar has often been at the front without an overwhelming amount of team support at key times, which has likely made his attacks less impactful and cost him key time.

  • For example, on Stages 2, he only had Adam Yates setting up his attack, and today, he had a rider, Juan Ayuso, literally hiding in the back of the group to avoid riding at the front, which would have increased the pace and given Pogačar a better draft leading into his attack.

    • Almeida exposing Ayuso's shenanigans of riding at the back of the bunch and feigning weakness as a ploy to avoid blowing up after going deep for his teammate so he could stay high up in the GC himself is an issue. It could break the trust inside the team, and UAE could have serious issues getting buy-in from other riders, like Adam Yates and Almeida, who are losing time and hurting their own GC chances due to the work they are performing.

• Even if we are being charitable and assume that Ayuso thought he couldn’t help his team, the fact that he was still holding on shows that he prioritizes staying high up in the GC versus pacing his teammate. The big question for the team should be: How does Ayuso’s high GC placing move Pogačar’s interests forward if the competition knows he isn’t going to risk pushing himself over the edge in the service of Pogačar?

  • Ayuso passively riding to fourth place overall might be great for him and UAE’s UCI points, but it does absolutely nothing for Pogačar. A rider high up in the GC acting as road furniture is neither a risk to riders contesting the overall win nor offers no help to their teammates.

    • And, a team that has failed to win the last two Tours de France cannot afford to be cute with attempting to stack the podium; they have to put everything behind Pogačar and have the entire team back him if they want to get back into the business of winning the Tour.

      • This is precisely why Adam Yates, last year’s third-place finisher overall, tanked his own chances of another high finish to set up Pogačar’s attack. At this point, you have to wonder if Pogačar would be better served by bringing Rafał Majka, who would have ridden in front to set up Pogačar attack whenever needed, in place of Ayuso.

3) Behind Tadej Pogačar and His Uae Teammates, an Elite Group of GC Contenders Had Mixed Days:

Jonas Vingegaard: Today’s test on the Galibier, which featured an hour of climbing, unsurprisingly exposed the defending champion’s suboptimal preparation more than the five-minute effort back on Stage 2. In particular, his complete exhaustion over the top, after following Pogačar wheel for just a few seconds, showed that he may have serious fitness issues later in this race.

• While Vingegaard clearly isn’t at his best, he is still riding at an incredibly high level, and may likely still be the rider most capable of challenging Vingegaard. However, any suggestion that he will get better relative to Pogačar as the race goes on seems to be based on selective logic, since Pogačar’s much better base means he should be far better positioned to handle the difficulties later in the race than Vingegaard.

Primož Roglič: The stories of the day will be centered around others, but Roglič’s underperformance through the first four stages, along with his ability to paper over the cracks and limit his time losses, is one of the biggest things nobody is talking about.

• Before the race, he was considered one of the premier GC contenders for this race, but these early struggles on the two hardest stages of the race so far (Stages 2 and 4) could signal that he will continue to slip down the GC standings as the race gets harder and harder.

  • But, if these early struggles are due to some sort of illness and he uses the long break before the Pyrenees at the end of last week to get back to a higher level, his ability to lose only 1’10 on Pogačar, and 24-seconds on the final podium spot, will be seen as an incredible feat in retrospect.

Remco Evenepoel: The Tour de France debutante passed the first major GC test and looked better on a day with multiple long alpine climbs than at any other point in his career. He still has a long way to go, and more climbing tests await, but his vast improvement since the Dauphiné is undeniable and makes him a podium contender.

• However, today’s route exposed his weakness in descending technical roads at high speeds, which will be critical later in this race.

  • Additionally, even if he holds this level for three weeks, it seems difficult to imagine how he would overtake Pogačar for the win since time trialing in a Grand Tour is a different challenge than standalone tests against the clock and tends to favor the rider who has already been taking time on the climbs, so serve to allow the stronger rider to extend their lead.

Stage 5 Preview

Tomorrow’s stage from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Saint Vulbas begins the Tour’s march north along the Rhône valley. With so many sprinters still in the mix, their teams are almost certain to ensure the 178-kilometer stage ends in a bunch sprint.

• Prediction: Jasper Philipsen and his Alpecin team get things back on track by controlling the final few kilometers and delivering Philipsen to yet another Tour stage win.