Seeing the clouds piled up above the Tourmalet, Thursday July 6, the followers of the Tour de France have long had the intuition that something was smoldering, without knowing when it was going to burst. All the warning signs of a major Jumbo-Visma offensive for its leader, Jonas Vingegaard, were there: Wout van Aert’s attack from kilometer zero, the tempo imposed by the Belgian on his breakaway companions in the first climbs of the day, the acceleration of his team, approaching the mythical pass classified out of category… But it was from Tadej Pogacar, the leader of the UAE Emirates formation, that the storm finally came.
The peloton said goodbye to the Pyrenees with a sixth stage also marking the first summit finish of this 2023 edition: the perfect opportunity for Vingegaard to widen the lead over its competitors in the general classification. In Cauterets-Cambasque (Hautes-Pyrénées), the defending champion recovers the yellow jersey well from the shoulders of the Australian Jai Hindley. However, he failed to strike the blow against his most dangerous rival: the Slovenian, winner of the day, even regained the psychological ascendancy over the Dane. While he was nearly a minute late from Tarbes, Pogacar is now 25 seconds behind the winner of the 2022 edition.
Unable to follow the latter, the day before, in the Marie-Blanque pass, the nugget of the UAE Emirates formation this time placed an acceleration 2.7 kilometers from the final, leaving Vingegaard speechless. “I won’t talk about revenge, I just wanted to win todaysavored the kid from Komenda. It boosts me, I feel better. “We tried in the Tourmalet, it was obvious, but we couldn’t [le] to take downexplained for his part the rider of the Dutch armada. As we had Wout van Aert to lead the train in the valley afterwards, it would have been perfect. But he had better legs [qu’hier]. »
The start of the day, however, looked like a new tactical demonstration from the Jumbo-Visma formation. First part of the device, Van Aert launches hostilities from the real start, taking about twenty runners. Then, the Dane’s team-mates increased the pace 9 kilometers from the Pyrenean giant, preparing the ground for their leader’s attack. They will initiate something in the second half of the ascent, we warn then in the car of the EF Education-EasyPost. “It’s going to go fast. »
“We can pack up and go home”
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