Tadej Pogačar descended the Mont Ventoux on Tuesday evening with his overall Tour de France lead intact after successfully resisting Jonas Vingegaard's fiercest climbing onslaught to date in this year's race, and with another achievement - the record time for the ascent of the 'Giant of Provence' - also added to his already massive palmares.
Despite a strong headwind, unofficial timings indicate Pogačar pulverised the previous best time of 55:51 for an ascent of the Ventoux, set by Iban Mayo in the 2004 Critérium du Dauphiné.
Twenty years later, after Vingegaard and Pogačar spent much of the same climb trying and failing to drop each other on the Tour's stage 16, at the summit the UAE Team Emirates-XRG racer outsprinting Vingegaard - who also broke Mayo's longstanding record, albeit finishing two seconds slower than Pogačar - with a time of 54:41.
On the downside for Pogačar, unlike other days he may not have been able to shed Vingegaard, while Visma-Lease a Bike's stunning display of teamwork on the climb to support their leader was impossible not to notice.
But with Vingegaard failing to break Pogačar's defences on a climb where he could leave the Tour leader behind in the 2021 race, the yellow jersey has taken another key step towards securing his fourth overall victory in Paris. Not the definitive one, of course, but a big one nonetheless.
"Sometimes I was at my limit," Pogačar said after launching two attacks of his own, both of which Vingegaard matched. "But the important thing was not to go too deep and lose time.
"I kept a little bit in reserve, and I simply tried to stay with Jonas. The big goal was to defend the yellow today and nothing else."
Even with his maillot jaune the top priority, Pogačar has also simultaneously taken both the Ventoux record and has returned to the mountains lead. He's also made a hefty dent in sprinter Jonathan Milan's advantage in the points jersey competition, closing the gap on the Lidl-Trek leader's hold on green from 28 points to 11.
But none of these achievements were specific targets on Pogačar's part on Tuesday. Equally, after so many top performances in the Tour de France and in his career in general, a simple but hugely successful defence of the yellow jersey like on the Ventoux did not perhaps carry the same impact as it would do for any other Tour leader.
Certainly Pogačar readily agreed with one journalist's post-stage observation that he was not Superman, but only human after all, saying with wry humour, "I'm definitely not Superman, I was born in Ljubljana, not wherever Superman was born, I forget. But today was an epic climb to do all the same."
"I was coming up quite fast, I could see the winners ahead in the last 800 metres, but not even Superman could have caught them there.
"In the end I was actually quite close to the breakaway, Chapeau to [stage winner Valentin] Paret-Peintre, he deserved the victory. It was a super-nice win."
To capture the Ventoux climbing record is no mean achievement in anyone's book though and when asked and if he had any upper limits to his performances, Pogačar played it down a little, saying "I don't think we could have ridden much faster."
"Jonas and his team did very good pacing, for today this was the limit for how fast we could ride.
"We rode hard to the bottom, first there was a fight for position, then more pacing, then he had Tiesj [Benoot] and Victor [Campenaerts] waiting for him, so their pacing was really executed perfectly.
"It all went pretty fast, though maybe if we'd cut a few corners, we'd have taken a couple more seconds and it'd have been quicker."
In terms of the Tour in general, Pogačar pointed out that "fortunately" he had had better legs than in 2021, when Vingegaard dropped him on the Ventoux. And for all some of his fans may have been disappointed he could not take the stage, coming through such a tough challenge unscathed keeps him exactly where he needs to be for the upcoming final mountain stages.
Perhaps his greater worry is his team - formidable on the flat on stage 16 with German powerhouse Nils Politt, but not as present in numbers as they were in the Pyrenees when the Visma mountain attacks rained down.
"I defended the yellow jersey well, as I had decided in the morning," Pogačar said in another post-race interview, before confirming he felt that the Tour GC battle was far from over.
"This was a mountain stage with a single climb and a long effort to get to its foot. The next days will be tougher."
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