When Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) is in the yellow jersey at the Tour de France, as he has been for 40 days of his career so far, he usually wants to keep it, and has reason to be fairly confident that he can.
However, after pulling on jersey number 41 in Caen on Wednesday evening, somewhat unusually he was soon talking about losing it, even as early as on stage 6.
Thanks to his stage 5 time trial effort, the Slovenian moved into the race lead, 42 seconds ahead of second-placed rider Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and 1:13 up on perennial rival Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike).
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After only five stages, these are excellent gaps for a GC rider to already have. But Pogačar was logically hesitant about seeing the rankings as being set in stone.
"I think the gap is temporary, we will see some fights in the next days, maybe even already tomorrow and the next days," he told media post-stage.
"So I'm happy with the gap, but we need to keep calm and concentrated to keep it until Paris."
UAE Team Emirates-XRG have made it clear already in this race that their goal is to have yellow in Paris, and anything along the way doesn't especially matter. Pogačar already gave up one jersey, when he got Tim Wellens to take the polka-dot jersey on stage 3 so he could win in rainbows the following day, but he could he actually give up yellow in the next days?
The defending Tour champion seemed to think it was a possibility on the hilly sixth stage to Vire Normadie, with six categorised climbs in the long 200km route. Furthermore, breakaway specialists are itching for a win, given that to date, no such moves have survived so far.
"I don't know what can happen tomorrow. Maybe it's a day for the breakaway and they can take the yellow jersey as well," Pogačar said on Wednesday.
"But I think it's going to be still quite a stressful day tomorrow. We will talk later over dinner with the guys and we will make some sort of plan about how to ride in the next couple of days."
However, the debate on whether a breakaway could actually take the lead from Pogačar remains open. The gaps in the top 10 may not be enormous, when you consider the 16 stages and volume of climbing still to come. But the margins after that, though are now fairly hefty, with not many breakaway contenders so near to the lead that they could realistically have a chance of taking it.
Assuming that UAE wouldn't make the mistake of letting top 20 GC dark horses like Ben O'Connor (Jayco AlUla, 17th at 4:07) or Felix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, 18th at 4:37) into a stage-winning break, any move would have to win by five minutes or more to be able to take the lead.
There are a few contenders around that mark, like Valentin Madouas (Groupama-FDJ) who is at 5:34, or Dylan Teuns (Cofidis) at 5:06. But it would have to be a really conscious decision from UAE to deliberately let a very big gap go. And even then, the other teams that are defending top-five positions might work both to stop their places being at risk and equally ensure that Pogačar's team has to continue defending yellow for more stages.
The only outlier in all these calculations is, perhaps, previous yellow jersey Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), who sits at 1:28. As an obviously non-GC rider, there's a chance he could be allowed in a break and fight his way back to the maillot jaune.
But if the last few seasons have taught us anything, it's that if Van der Poel is in the finale, Pogačar will want to be there as well.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the main goal, Pogačar said, is not specifically to keep the lead in yellow, but to keep a gap over his rivals.
"If we see an opportunity, we'll take it, but the main goal these days until the rest day is to keep calm and to defend the lead over the other GC riders," he explained.
Paris may be the goal, then, but with another Pogačar-perfect stage already coming up on stage 7 to the Mur de Bretagne as well, it looks most likely the Slovenian will be in yellow for the long haul.
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