Tadej Pogacar secured his third Tour de France title with another show of strength, bossing the closing time trial to claim a sixth stage win of this year’s race and his third in as many days.
Pogacar’s lead of more than five minutes starting the day left him free to take it easy on the 34km route between his adopted home of Monaco and Nice, but the Slovenian’s insatiable appetite for success showed in the risks he took on the descent off the Col d’Eze to beat his great rival Jonas Vingegaard.
The top three on the general classification finished in the same positions on the stage, with Pogacar clocking a time of 45 minutes 24 seconds, 63 seconds up on Vingegaard with another 11 seconds between the Dane and Remco Evenepoel.
Pogacar finished the Tour with a margin of victory of six minutes and 17 seconds, reclaiming the Tour title Vingegaard has held for the last two years, and confirming him as the first man to complete the Giro-Tour double since Marco Pantani in 1998.
“I cannot describe how happy I am after two hard years in the Tour de France where there were always some mistakes,” Pogacar said. “This year everything was to perfection, I’m out of words. I’m super happy to win here, incredible.
“I think this was the first Grand Tour where I was totally confident every day. Even in the Giro I had one bad day but I won’t tell which one.
“But this Tour was just amazing, I was enjoying it from day one until today. I had such great support behind me, I just couldn’t let anybody down.”
Pogacar joked that he had to go for victory on this stage, having driven his fiancee – Slovenian national champion Urska Zigart – mad with the number of times he had insisted on riding it while training.
The 25-year-old’s sights will now be on the world championships in Switzerland in September and the opportunity to become only the third man to complete cycling’s unofficial ‘triple crown’ – something last achieved by Ireland’s Stephen Roche in 1987.
“Some people might think the Giro was a safety net if I didn’t succeed in the Tour and, for sure, it would be – if I only succeeded in the Giro it would still be an incredible year, but to win the Tour is another level and to win both is another level about that,” Pogacar added.
“I think (Mathieu) Van der Poel looks really good in the world champion’s jersey and I want to take it from him. I want one time to have the rainbow jersey on my back but I still have time for that.”
Having bossed the Giro in May, winning by a margin of 10 minutes, Pogacar has dominated the Tour too, although that would no doubt have been very different but for the catalogue of horrific injuries suffered by Vingegaard at the Tour of the Basque Country in April.
The toll taken by that crash showed in the final week, but so did the fighting spirit of Vingegaard, who battled to ensure Tour debutant Evenepoel could not shake his grip on second place.
This was the first time in Tour history the race had not finished in Paris – the relocation enforced by preparations for the Olympic Games which open next Friday.
It was also the first time since 1989 that the race ended with a time trial. That day Greg LeMond overturned a 50-second deficit to beat an ailing Laurent Fignon by just eight seconds, but there was no danger of that this time, given Pogacar’s margin.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
