Visma-Lease a Bike's Jonas Vingegaard may have been hoping for a return to happy memories as the Tour de France visited the Hautacam on stage 12, but finished the day with anything but joy as he ceded over two minutes to stage winner and rival Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG).
Returning to the climb where Vingegaard sealed his 2022 Tour victory over Pogačar, and the race's first hors catégorie climb, Visma started the day with a plan to get their Danish leader ahead of his perennial rival. Instead, he fell even further back.
Vingegaard simply couldn't hold onto the attack Pogačar put in at the bottom of the Hautacam, and ended up finishing second, but 2:10 down on the Slovenian, dropping to 3:31 down on the overall. He's still in the runner-up spot, but Visma are looking at a very tough-to-fix deficit.
"For now, it's a heavy defeat, of course, we hope for more, but Jonas still finished second, it's not the end of the world," Visma DS Grischa Niermann tried to reason to ITV's Daniel Friebe. "But Tadej showed who is the best rider here, and it will be very hard to turn it around in the next weeks."
The attack on the Hautacam may have been the decisive blow, but really, Vingegaard and Visma's day took a negative turn much before that. Their plan was to ride hard on the Col du Soulor, some 50km from the finish, and potentially isolate or tire Pogačar early.
Instead, the pace saw Visma's key domestique Matteo Jorgenson struggle early on the Soulor, proving to be a significant loss for Visma.
"Matteo was not on a good day," Niermann added to TNT Sports. "We had a plan and then all of a sudden we heard that Matteo is dropped, so that was of course not according to what we wanted."
Jorgenson himself had little to offer in terms of an explanation, clearly disappointed by his own performance, and for the team.
"For me, not good," he said of his day. "I have no excuses really. I was on a bad day from the start and just had really bad sensations.
"The plan was to get a guy in the break as a satellite ride, hopefully get one of us across to them. None of that worked out."
From there, Vingegaard relied on Sepp Kuss and Simon Yates, but even with two former Grand Tour winners as domestiques, there was little he could do when Pogačar put in his decisive acceleration.
At the time of writing, Vingegaard is yet to provide any public reaction to the day's racing, perhaps processing what happened, almost certainly prioritising recovery ahead of Friday's mountain time trial.
However, his DS did offer a little insight into the Dane's feelings and confirmed that he had not indicated that he was having a bad day.
"I think Jonas was feeling well, but on the last climb, of course, Pogačar was clearly the best and in the end he suffered a lot," Niermann said. "I haven't spoken to the riders yet, but it was a very hard day, and in the end, the best rider won."
Vingegaard is still in second place, which is likely only a small consolation given he has won the Tour de France twice already, but there was a sense of resignation from Visma – that there is one rider in this race who is simply too tough to beat.
"I think it was for sure not his best day, but he's still the best of the rest, and congrats to Tadej and to UAE," Niermann concluded. "They showed who is the strongest rider here."
The Tour de France is the biggest race in cycling, and a Cyclingnews subscription offers you unlimited access to our unrivalled coverage. Get all the breaking news and analysis from our team on the ground in France, plus the latest pro tech, live race reports, and a daily subscriber-only newsletter with exclusive insight into the action. Find out more.
