When Tadej Pogacar dramatically toppled a shell-shocked Primoz Roglic in the final time-trial of the 2020 Tour de France to snatch the yellow jersey from the Jumbo-Visma team, Jonas Vingegaard was in hospital, celebrating the arrival of his first child.
“I had just had my daughter, so I was watching from the hospital,” this year’s race leader said, on the eve of the 2022 Tour’s final “race of truth”, after being asked if memories of Roglic’s humiliation at the hands of Pogacar still haunted the team.
“I wouldn’t say we talk a lot about it. For me, tomorrow [Saturday] is about doing everything I can to keep this beautiful [yellow] jersey. I’ll give everything I have.”
With a lead of three minutes and 26 seconds over Pogacar (UAE Emirates) going into this Tour’s penultimate stage, Vingegaard can be confident but not complacent.
Right now, the omens are good and his team is flying. In Cahors, his French team-mate Christophe Laporte won stage 19 after holding off the pursuing peloton in the shade of the plane trees lining the Boulevard Leon Gambetta.
“It’s been an incredible Tour for us so far,” Vingegaard said. “Five stage wins, we have the green jersey, the yellow, the polka dot, we just have to do our best tomorrow and hopefully I can bring the yellow jersey to Paris. We’re not there yet.”
Laporte bridged across to the stage’s last breakaway group, including Britain’s Fred Wright, in the final kilometre. A strong time trialist and sprinter, the Frenchman accelerated clear of the leading trio with only 400 metres left to race, and hard though Wright tried, he was unable to prevent the 29-year-old from taking the first Tour stage win of his career. For Wright, it was his third near miss, after coming close to a stage win both in Lausanne and Saint-Étienne.
This has been a torrid and tortuous Tour for sprinters, with only three field sprints in 19 days of racing. Mark Cavendish, not picked by his Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl team, might now be thinking he has had a lucky escape.
Caleb Ewan, last man standing on the race’s general classification, and Fabio Jakobsen, winner of stage two to Nyborg, have both suffered hugely in this Tour’s mountain stages.
Ewan, riding for Lotto Soudal and once tipped to be Cavendish’s successor, is now five and a half hours behind race leader Vingegaard and clinging on to the hope that maybe he can reprise his 2019 win in Paris on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday.
Earlier, the stage was again briefly held up by the climate change activists, Dernière Rénovation, who brought the peloton to a halt 160km from the finish. It was the group’s third protest of the race.
“We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to this sporting event. We are trying to force the government to stick to its own engagements,” a statement said.
Meanwhile, the Astana-Qazaqstan team’s wholly forgettable Tour was made even worse when news broke that the team’s star rider, Miguel Ángel López, a former Tour stage winner, had been stopped by police after being linked to a drug trafficking case in Spain.
“The news that was spread in the media yesterday evening caught us by surprise, and at the moment we do not have any details,” the team said. Lopez has also won stages on the Vuelta a España, and is a past winner of the Tour de Suisse and the Volta a Catalunya.
Lopez was understood to have been intercepted at the Madrid-Barajas Airport by police in connection to the investigation. However his agents, Javier de las Heras and Alfredo Gómez, then denied that Lopez is under investigation, and denied all reports of an arrest, claiming that he underwent only a routine search.
“Lopez denies having a relationship/participation in any criminal act related to the distribution of unauthorised medicines or any other product referred to in the news,” their statement added. – Guardian
