Jonas Vingegaard and Visma-Lease a Bike played down any rivalry with Tadej Pogačar and his UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad after stage 6 to Vire Normandie.
Visma-Lease a Bike upped the pace on the final climbs of stage 6 and nearly brought the gap down enough to force Pogačar and his team to stay in the yellow jersey, but missed the mark by a single second.
Pogačar was happy to lose the yellow jersey by a single second to Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), who went deep in the breakaway of the stage, won by Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost), to take back yellow.
"If UAE wants to give the jersey away, that's their problem," Visma's Head of Racing Grischa Niermann said bluntly before playing down the rivalry.
"Mathieu took it by one second. We wanted a hard race and we wanted to fight for the stage from the break. In the end, we had Simon there, he had a chance but Ben Healy was in a class of his own and deserved the victory."
Vingegaard is surrounded by television cameras and journalists before and after every stage of the Tour. Just 24 hours after his disappointing time trial, everyone was still asking what went wrong on the roads of Caen. He lost 1:05 to Pogačar in the 33km Caen time trial and slipped to 1:13 down on the Slovenian.
Vingegaard was quizzed about his disappointing time trial immediately after his ride on Wednesday, on Thursday morning before the start of stage 6, and again at the finish.
Visma-Lease a Bike thinks they have identified why Vingegaard and teammate Matteo Jorgenson lost more than a minute but preferred not to fully reveal why.
"It was something specific to the time trial but we're going to keep the information internally in the team," directeur sportif Arthur van Dongen said at the start.
Vingegaard also held back on revealing the exact cause of his time loss.
"Yesterday was a tough day for me. I was definitely disappointed, as I should be," he said after stage 6.
"But I had a good night of sleep and today is a new day. The Tour is long, so we're still optimistic. I'm happy with how I was feeling today. Now we focus on tomorrow."
He refuted a suggestion it was due to an opening week of aggressive racing.
"I don't think that's the reason. Then I would have also been suffering today. We have to analyse what happened. It's been quite a tough first week.
"When I saw the Tour route, I thought it'd be an easy first week but to be honest, it hasn't been. Hopefully, the race will build up more and more and hopefully, this Tour de France will be a very hard one."
Vingegaard was surprised to lose so much time in the time trial but is convinced he is in better form than at the Critérium du Dauphiné, where Pogačar beat him convincingly.
"I definitely got better than at the Dauphine. I'm definitely sure about that," he said.
"Is it enough? We'll see by the end of the Tour."
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