After the opening weekend’s hilly stages and yesterday flat one, the race has today a hard mountain stage.
3900 meters of climbing and they will go above 2000m (they will climb up to 2627m on the Galibier).
Pogacar should test Vingegaard, and it could be too much climbing for Remco.
But, even with the precious climbing data, the slopes may not be hard enough to make differences. They should go full gas the whole climb and some riders can break when surpassing the 2000m mark.
Great attack by Pogacar, the descending was pretty scary. Evenepoel seemed to be struggling with it on the more technical section with the switchbacks but once it straightened out he looked extremely strong once again. He is impressing me considering this is his first time racing at the Tour.
Carapaz getting dropped early on Galibier with his teammates up ahead was very strange. I’m not sure if the team was hedging its bets or there was poor communication but it looked pretty bad considering they ended up dragging him to the finish line anyway. Contrast that with how quickly UAE sorted out their issues when Ayuso was shirking his team responsibilities on the final climb.
It was an impressive performance, but still he only took a few seconds on the Galibier. It was significant however, that Vingegaard lost more time on the descent, he didn’t look so strong.
But the Tour is long, Vingegaard can improve his performance and Pogacar feel the fatigue from the Giro. Or Vingegaard can miss the training he should have done, we’ll have to wait.
Last year started in a similar way, with Vingegaard stealing a few seconds to Pogacar on the pirinees, and then he was even stronger. And Pogacar has been able to leave Vingegaard a few seconds behind on multiple occasions with his powerful rithm change.
I don’t know what to think yet about those two.
Remco did better than I expected. Rodriguez was on par and Roglic a bit worse than I hoped.
Visma as a team failed, while UAE was impressive (maybe too impressive). Landa was very good also for his team.
The rest only can hope someone to fail to enter the top-10 and/or fight for stages.
(How will this comment age until the end of the race?)