The prodigy and the winner
We have a new chapter written of cycling history, of a great rivalry and of two two-time winners.
In a sport such as cycling, where stuff seems always heightened – what is bad is intensely bad, what is good is intensely good and what is mundane is intensely mundane – narratives become so strong as to seem self-fueling; they run on their own self-generating energy, somehow. They change quickly, voraciously, become grandiose because it is a sport with such epic qualities. Especially when it comes to the Tour de France. There is something so insane about the concept of a cycling Grand Tour, which puts its participants through a hell of brutal endurance like few other sporting disciplines seem to do, that precisely its ridiculousness makes how we perceive it, this frantic endeavor. Things go back and forth and back and forth. It’s so much, so many kilometers, such endless pedaling, yet defined by such slight, ephemeral moments. Probably the most grand moment of this grand tour, where time became thwarted, bent, dizzying, will be courtesy of the Tour’s overall second-place finisher. An attack so full of stand-out-of-your-seat excitement that it will be remembered as such regardless of how it all ended. A moment somehow bigger than anything else because it captured you so profoundly, because it can exist in juxtaposition to bitter defeat, to coming up short. It lives in spite of how it ultimately ended, because a story needs its moments in order to… be. It will be just a moment only in itself, not the image through which all be explained. The guy that ran away, so powerfully, won the exciting battle but not the treacherous war. The prodigy was gonna be unreachable once upon a time, yet somehow, he has been, now twice. A Tour so great, though so devastatingly decided, one-sided at its colophon.
That’s the thing. That is what swings in the pendulum of cycling. Amongst the best mano-a-mano battles in the history of the Tour de France all the way up until it suddenly it wasn’t, a one-two punch, spread over two days, all these hours that separated the two singular events within the events but that looking back seemed to have happened in a sequence of mere seconds. The back n’ forth, an inch, a second, one guy better than the other and everyone else a world away. It is in space, the one between the worlds, where Tadej Pogačar fell, so much better than anyone else; so emphatically defeated by Jonas Vingegaard.
We live in this world where we search for the best, for the greatest satisfaction we can find, in vastly different ways, amongst vastly different contexts and to vastly different lengths. But we do, we want things better than what they are, we want to see potential fulfilled so badly. We want promising stories to crown themselves in accordance. It completes our desire for symmetry, for our hopes to not be let down, for our created ideals to be allowed to be exactly that: ideals – real ideals. Reminiscent of the Tour de France of 1989, an event I didn’t live but an event of which its essence I think I can grasp and understand. The ultimate thrill, the butting of heads, side-by-side, riding a bike, reaching the finish line quicker but only ever-so-quicker than the other. Bernard Hinault vs Greg LeMond, the closest Tour in history. Through days and days, one stage after the other, Pogačar vs Vingegaard was likewise paper thin. The hope, the ideal, being that it would resolve it itself in the same impossibly epic fashion that it did all those years ago between the Frenchman and the Americanman. Riding that fascination we gazed intently at every little move, every potentially deciding thing.
Enthralled we most definitely were. For many people it will not be enough, though, because it was quite literally not enough to satiate the entire length of the Tour itself. We lived so intensely for those days, like you don’t always do in Grand Tours, where stuff discombobulates, where the deciding factors end up in disarray and the overall spectacle an unsatisfying play, one guy way ahead or maybe it is close but everyone plays conservative until it ends with no sense of climax. But we still want more, we still would like better, all of this maxed out in every possibility of ecstatic thrill. Sometimes, we just can’t have it all. The luckiest of ones do, but it is precisely that, luck, that can’t always deliver rounded perfection to our ambitious dreams. Because you need so much of it. Like you need so much of so many different things to win a freaking Tour de France. Luck but also talent of godly magnitude. Even that, Pogačar, many would say, has. He definitely has. But perhaps Vingegaard has even more of it. The margins are so slim, because even seven minutes are nothing, only an illusory Grand Canyon-like difference. It is not real, but still, it is, inside the confines of what cycling is, within the particularities of such a distinct sport and by how we parse it all together in order to make sense of it. Worlds apart, but only in the form of seven tiny units of sixty seconds and some change. After you’ve rode neck and neck across a whole goddamn country, it’s seven minutes between them. Nothing and everything.
Back at the start of it all, of this year’s Tour, I was trying to soak everything up as best I could. In the first three stages, which ran through the Spanish side of the Basque Country, and also in the days leading up to it. That this would be the battle, Tadej vs Jonas, seemed pretty certain. The picks for the Tour winner were overwhelmingly amongst these two – two riders of excellency. So much so that there just wasn’t an alternative, a surprise, to be had. There just could not this time. No new force because in these two we had two forces… of nature. No one in the make of a Jan Ullrich or a Frank Vandenbroucke, two cycling legends in their own right, of which I went to see their respective biographies be presented in Bilbao in a fabulous quaint little sports bookshop called “Libros de Ruta”. As a relative newcomer to cycling, only having been “immersed” for about the last six years, it gave me an even profounder appreciation for a sport so soaked in brilliant substance. It has an essence so unique that it is hard to not become enchanted if it gets even a brief hold of you. This edition of the Tour delivered on that magic, even if not completely, one hundred percently. When I listened to cycling writers Daniel Friebe with his Ullrich book or Andy McGrath with his Vandenbroucke book, there was something just captivating, in the stories of the books themselves but of their owned lived experiences as journalists of this wild sport. For me at least, the added sense of attraction to it all was unshakable.
Things would soon shake up, as the race commenced and everyone pushed that first pedal down. As Pog vs Vin (not Diesel) would slowly heat up, live its own in crescendo in the background, one of the Yates twins, Adam, would win Stage 1 through the scenic hills and mountains of the Biscay province. After a fifteen-year wait of repeated disappointment, of zero Tour de France stage wins, team Cofidis would not be kept at bay anymore and Victor Lafay punched through the peloton to win Stage 2 in San Sebastián. We were off to the races, as they say. Even I, who during Stage 2 saw the cyclists go by at a spot in a neighboring town, ran to catch a train right after, which was the only feasible way to make it in time, and barely made it to witness the action at the finish line in San Sebastián. Lafay I don’t believe I quite caught, as I tried to make my way through the crowd, but I did a chunk of the rest of the peloton.
After the first two days being completed, the added wrinkle of interest, of intrigue, was that Adam Yates wore the Yellow Jersey that distinguishes the overall race leader at the Tour. A teammate of Pogačar’s on UAE Team Emirates, there was that question of if the unwritten responsibility of being race leader would alter tactics or the flow of the Tour with the “number two guy” of sorts on the team leading the whole thing for the time being. Thankfully for them, it did not change things in any adverse sense. Our senses would soon be taken for a ride as we reached the Pyrenees within the first handful of days of this year’s Tour.
After Jasper Philipsen rampaged through the sprint finishes of the flat intermediate stages, all the way up the mountains we saw go a guy from down under like Jai Hindley. But it was all just precursor, preamble, for this generation’s greatest to fight it out, to deliver the first swinging punches. What they had in store was an all-time classic moment, an attack for annals of cycling history, so viciously, so beautifully captured by the cameraman on the motorcycle ahead. Pogačar went all in against Vingegaard in Cauterets-Cambasque and won. One of the most electrifying sequences this century in the Tour. The attack sustained itself in Pogačar, Vingegaard left back and all the way to a decisive reaching of the finish line. Amongst any tacit suspicions that he might not be fully fit, one hundred percent physically after snapping his wrist earlier this year, as they say in Spanish: “Hay carrera”. There is race.
The first of all the microcosmic events that make a Tour a Tour, that thread one stage with the next, and that thread one battle for the Yellow Jersey with the next. Back down the mountainous peaks for all the other things that occur and that also so crucially make a Tour a Tour. Philipsen would get a stage win in wine country to continue cementing his possession of the Green Jersey that signifies the best sprinting rider. Veteran Canadian rider Michael Woods would get his first ever TdF stage win in a sort of magic mountain called Puy de Dôme, which hadn’t been visited by the Tour since the 1980s. But what laid beneath the one-day winners, the sprinting stages, was our war of worlds, galaxies away, minutes mounting on the stopwatch between our two main protagonists Vingegaard & Pogačar and everyone else. Each little push, a feeling of suspense, of excitement: would one or the other lose their counterpart’s wheel? But they had legs, and willpower, of steel. They would not break, no matter the thrust the other would fulfill, complete. It was over and over again replicated by one another. It was so defiantly close, us spectators at the mercy of their greatness and how far it could go.
We weren’t exactly novices to this, to this awe-inspiring rivalry, having taken place its first real chapter last year. What was gonna be Pogačar’s era has now turned into an era of a distinct, unmissable back n’ forth between him and someone that might be even better, if such a thing is even quite measurable outside of a blunt palmarès. But neither here nor there does it matter exactly who is more talented; it matters, supersedingly, who wins. Back in the still very strange times of 2021 we saw these two go at it. Pogačar, the youngest of bona fide phenoms, already a Tour de France winner the year prior: against Vingegaard’s teammate, then team-leader, Primož Roglič. He pulled the win out of Roglič’s hands in brutal fashion, on the second-to-last stage. It was a jaw-dropping moment if we had ever seen one in this sport. But there would not be a second part to the Roglič vs Pogačar rivalry as the future Great Dane came onto the scene, initially as Roglič’s uprising star domestique but taking the reins of the team as Primoz went down to injury, figuratively and literally in that following Tour. From there, to now: What has solidified itself as a full-on rivalry started to spring into existence in that Tour from two years ago with the added guest that was Richard Carapaz, keeping up but only with Jonas as only a threat to the guy who was starting to make us wonder if someone could ever catch him, if someone would ever be again a total, undisputed threat to him. Pogačar seemed untouchable and from the time he beat Roglič that sunny but slightly chilled September day all the way to last year, to the 2022 Tour de France, he remained so. The prodigy was exactly that by way of two Tours won.
But along, finally, fully, came Vingegaard, to wrestle away from the Slovenian a Tour win. To avenge his own sort of loss a year prior, and in the total form of his Jumbo-Visma team, to also avenge their loss through Roglič’s quasi-collapse of 2020.
For as much as we want to imprint easy narratives to things that happen, to brutal losses that sometimes are only such because of even greater sporting feats, they are just too layered and complex to do so; much less straightforward than we would perhaps like them to be. Roglič didn’t fail, he was knocked out by an incredible Pogačar. Fast forward three years: Pogačar didn’t fail, he was pulverized by Vingegaard like he did to Roglič before. Both disasters, both marvelous performances – depending on which vantage point you choose – in the same kind of cycling event: an individual time trial. We went into stage number 16 of 21 at the Tour wondering if it would come to be another step in which virtually nothing could separate Jonas and Tadej, both of them just too good of a match for the other. The slight advantage kept falling into Vingegaard’s possession, but with only ten seconds separating them, it all came to ahead as they, number 1 and number 2 in the standings, would be the last two to depart in the Time-Trial. Everyone goes in inverted order. We finish with the best two. Or rather, as we soon were reminded, as we soon found out, with the best one. Pogačar’s time trial performance was fantastic, spectacular, one whole minute-plus better than cycling’s quintessential time-trialist: Wout van Aert. The thing is, right behind him on the road, Vingagaard wasn’t just fantastic and spectacular: he was legendary. With that otherworldly performance, it was done, it was over. A whole other minute and a half better than Pogačar to show everyone that this time he, Vingegaard, was the one.
In awe we stood, shook we sat. It was a stage of historic significance, a time difference now established between the two suspectedly unsalvageable unless Pogačar could come back in even greater legendary fashion. But no. The cards would not fall like that; though he, Pogačar, would. The very next day, on the Col de la Loz, after giving all he had to give for only to be humbled by his rival, a kerfuffle in the peloton a few kilometers into things was the spark and the rest of the stage was the wildfire. Pogačar fell – first literally but then figurately, by time and space. It was over. A couple of scratches from the literal fall but beneath, inside, he had been broken. “I’m gone, I’m dead”, he said on the team’s radio. Vingegaard and most of everyone else rode away, as Pogačar fell off that world, that other planet that he had shared with the guy, to now be lost in space and time. Only teammate Marc Soler left to act as guiding star, for him not to drop into the ordinary. Pogačar himself would days later say, jokingly, that the scary, demanding look in Soler’s eyes, as he kept checking on him through the rest of that stage of collapse, was the only thing that kept him powerful enough to keep going when he was “gone, dead”.
Completely disarmed, with a smile vanished, the Slovene and us who wanted things to go all the way to Stage 20, the last act before officially closing with the crowd-pleaser sprint in Paris. The war for the Tour had ended abruptly, brutally, extraordinarily. Pogačar remained exactly that last thing, but Vingegaard so much more so. Former cyclist, the legendary Sean Kelly, had predicted what ultimately came to pass: that whatever was to unfold in the first two weeks, it would be in week 3 where Tadej would not be able to sustain the push for the overall Tour win. Because of the aforementioned broken wrist sustained a couple of months prior to the Tour, wrecking his preparations for cycling’s three-week Super Bowl, those clouds of doubt did somewhat linger over us all as to whether or not he could compete to the lengths that Vingegaard would in all likelihood set. He could not, ultimately, as Kelly forecasted.
But after having to be convinced that night on Col de la Loz to not retire from this year’s Tour by his girlfriend, fellow cyclist Urška Žigart, we still had hundreds of kilometers to go before reaching Paris on Sunday and it wasn’t all over. Through sheer perseverance, by power of will and resilience through what had been this prodigy’s most brutal and devastating loss of his career, Pogačar from the ashes rose back to be his best self, one more time before we were all finished here. In the intermediate, fellow Slovenian Matej Mohorič captured one of the most emotional, heartfelt wins in a while on Stage 19. A post-race interview for the ages from Mohorič gave us such a raw, sentimental, harrowing and reconciliatory peek behind the guys that make cycling such a frantic, cruel but also fantastic sport. We feel, negatively, positively or even indifferently with such intensity because of how hardcore it all is. Emotionally, physically, psychologically, all in one… there’s nothing quite like this.
We saw eternal bridesmaid Thibaut Pinot bathed in adoration as he led solo the race of Stage 20 before his retirement at the end of this Tour. Him perhaps his own kind of prodigal son of France, the land where cycling stars may not always be born but where they most commonly are forged. He might not have fulfilled all the expectations he had on his shoulders by way of him being perhaps the best French-born Grand Tour rider of the last twenty years. But he still kinda did on this very last act – or it kinda didn’t even matter because look those scenes of absolute fervor as he went up the mountain and say that he, in his own right, wasn’t a winner of something. The rest of the most proficient guys in the peloton caught up to him looking to capture the stage triumph. Not quite by Spain’s biggest source of this-year-regained Tour pride Carlos Rodríguez, but by the Yates twins, Warren Barguil, Felix Gall and of course Vin and Pog. Having finally caught a second wind of sorts, days after the bitterest disappointment, one more treat was in store. Having climbed the climb, Vingegaard had secured his general classification win of the Tour de France 2023, but there were intangibles left up for grabs, the opportunity to paint one last extra bit of fun and Pogačar went all for it and, as the best sprinter of the bunch, won the stage – when it wasn’t “necessary”, when the most important thing was already sealed. But that’s what makes him, as well as this simmering rivalry, so special. A little thrust, for fun, with a grin. Because running a Tour might be a treacherous war, but it is also fun. The battle was thrillingly good for all those days that it stayed neck and neck, between the prodigy and the winner, a guy that might be even better. Next year, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to do it again.