{"id":263541,"date":"2025-07-14T06:30:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T06:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/263541\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T06:30:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T06:30:10","slug":"a-tough-guy-who-likes-to-bully-his-opponents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/263541\/","title":{"rendered":"A tough guy who likes to bully his opponents"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tour de France<\/a> is likely to be decided in the mountains between Tadej Pogacar<\/a> and Jonas Vingegaard<\/a>, but with so many flat and hilly stages beforehand, the current battle feels more psychological between UAE Team Emiratess – XRG and Team Visma <\/a>| Lease a Bike. That has been fully visible for days already, and the yellow jersey certainly does not have nice words from everyone in the cycling community.<\/p>\n

On stage 6 Visma raced very aggressively at the start to try and have riders in the breakaway and create chaos for UAE; and at the end of the stage pushed the pace hard – likely in an attempt to keep the Slovenian in the yellow jersey, hence losing recovery time and putting UAE in the responsibility position in the peloton.<\/p>\n

After the stage Pogacar looked rattled over the Dutch team’s tactics, but within Visma there was indifference over the comments. Throughout social media however many keep a close eye on all movements, and a particular moment yesterday where Pogacar pushed Matteo Jorgenson in a feed zone has stirred the pot once again.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“It’s obvious that Pogacar was irritated on Thursday (after stage 6 to Vire, ed.). If van der Poel does something stupid, he gives him a pat on the back… And why did Alpecin-Deceuninck ride at the front on Friday? Because Pogacar and van der Poel are friends,” Thomas Dekker said in the Live Slow Ride Fast podcast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the Het Wiel there were tougher words on the World Champion, as Roxane Knetemann directly criticized Pogacar’s action: “He’s a tough guy who likes to bully his opponents. Pogacar is an extroverted winner, and Vingegaard is an introverted winner. Pogacar doesn’t need to do what he’s doing now.”<\/p>\n

Whilst the riders and sports directors refuse the idea of boiling tensions within the two teams, many speculate that this is the case – regardless of it being shown publicly or behind the scenes. Marijn Abbenhuijs argued this exactly:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they just hate each other; I’ve had that impression for a while. And that may not only apply to UAE and Visma but perhaps also to Alpecin and Visma”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tour de France is likely to be decided in the mountains between Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-263541","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\/114850183519681929","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263541","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=263541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}