Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar secured his first Criterium du Dauphine title after finishing third in Sunday’s final stage.<\/b><\/p>\n
The reigning Tour de France and road world champion began the final day one minute and one second ahead of his closest rival Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard thanks to back-to-back stage wins on Friday and Saturday.<\/p>\n
And the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider safely negotiated the 133.3km stage from Val-d’Arc to the Plateau du Mont-Cenis to finish alongside Vingegaard, 34 seconds behind stage winner Lenny Martinez.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a really amazing week,” said Pogacar, who topped the overall standings by 58 seconds for his 99th professional win in stages, races and general classification leads – the most by an active rider.<\/p>\n
“Once again today, the team did a great job. We managed to defend the [yellow] jersey and we can go home happy and prepare for the Tour [de France].<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of positives from this week and we turned all the negatives into positives, so it’s all good.<\/p>\n
“There’s not much to do ahead of the Tour. I rest a bit, maybe some extra work for the time-trial, and then I’m ready.”<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old becomes the third reigning world champion to win the race, after French pair Louison Bobet and Bernard Hinault in 1955 and 1981 respectively.<\/p>\n
German Florian Lipowitz completed the overall podium ahead of Belgian Remco Evenepoel.<\/p>\n
French rider Martinez, 21, got past Spaniard Enric Mas eight kilometres from the finish of the mountainous stage to add to his wins in the Tour de Romandie and Paris-Nice earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Attention will now switch to the Tour de France which begins on Saturday, 5 July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar secured his first Criterium du Dauphine title after finishing third in Sunday’s final stage. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-188203","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114691426454292817","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}