Tadej Pogačar will likely reign over the Tour de France for a long time. But not forever.
Gruber Images, Cor Vos
It is hard to call something revenge when ressentiment is absent. It went simply, the gap, quietly even, not full of rage or impudence, nor, on the other hand, joy. One moment there were two riders at the steep foot of the Hautacam, the next there was one. It felt inevitable. Perhaps it was. The span of road between one man and the next and the man after him stretched out impersonally. The ensuing gaps spanned from hairpins to kilometers, as though the climb were a black hole men disappeared into.
Tadej Pogačar, injured, was unusually stiff as he made his way through the orgy of spectators, passed under one banner after the next. Jonas Vingegaard, who finally teetered off the edge of belief, had his mouth open, his hands on the tops of his bars. He kept his cadence steady – that’s his style of riding – as the world blurred by him and wouldn’t stop. Everyone on Hautacam languished under the heat of the Pyrenean sun. Not a single soul was spared from suffering. It’s been like that for a while now.
This has been a strange Tour de France to watch. There is something simultaneously stagnant and desperate about it. The inevitability of Pogačar, we all knew deep down, began before the race, perhaps in the Critérium du Dauphiné, which he made look like a club ride, or perhaps, even, in Paris last year. Those who forwent hope as early as Rouen were right to do so, though no one feels good about conceding things so easily. It’s been half a decade since Pogačar’s first Tour win, if you can believe it. It might take another before we see any cracks in his armor.
Often in the last few years, there’s been a sense of bleak resignation from much of the peloton whenever Pogačar, Vingegaard or Mathieu van der Poel start a race. A sense of: there’s no possibility of winning, so why even bother? But it’s a funny fact of human nature that, when all feels decided, when dominance is indisputable – when there is no such thing as hope – the possibility of another world, the stirrings of the future can always be found beneath the surface. Not at once, but in piecemeal.
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