BERNARD PAPON / AP
It is a little music well known to the Tour de France peloton, which the duel between Tadej Pogacar, double winner of the event, and Jonas Vingegaard, the outgoing winner, has brought up to date. Since the big start in Bilbao (Spain) on July 1, the two men have been fighting a fierce battle at the top of the general classification, with extraordinary performances.
Monday July 17, after two weeks of racing, only ten seconds separate them. The third man, the Spaniard Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos-Grenadiers), points to him, 5 min 21 sec from the yellow jersey, when the tenth in the general classification, the French Guillaume Martin (Cofidis), is already relegated to almost a quarter of an hour.
Inevitably, this ultra-domination raises questions. “I get asked this question every year”recalled Tadej Pogacar, during the press conference organized on Monday by his team, UAE Emirates. “We drive fast, we go full throttle every step of the way. People question themselves because of the past [du cyclisme]. They worry about it, and that’s something I can completely understand. » In this sport, the specter of the Festina affair in 1998 or of Lance Armstrong, whose seven titles on the Grande Boucle were scratched from the list after he admitted to having doped a large part of his career, do not is never far away.
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Sunday, it was the leader of the Jumbo-Visma who had to respond to journalists on this subject on arrival in Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc (Haute-Savoie). That day, Pogacar and Vingegaard had only taken 18 min 27 sec to overcome the last difficulty, the climb of Bettex (7 kilometers at 7.7%, 1st category). A speed record: it is 42 seconds less than the previous one, established by Chris Froome, quadruple winner of the Tour.
“It’s okay to be skeptical”
Already the day before, the two men had been faster – by five seconds – than Marco Pantani, in 1997, over the first ten kilometers of the Col de Joux Plane (11.6 km at 8.5%, out of category). But the Slovenian and the Dane having measured themselves on the last 1,600 meters of the ascent, in an attempt to obtain precious bonuses at the top, the Italian, involved in multiple doping cases, finally kept his record of the climb for just under a minute.
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“It’s true that we are going fast, even faster than [certains tricheurs avérés] », acknowledged Vingegaard on Sunday, adding that he was not taking any banned product. Before claiming: “Equipment, nutrition, training, everything has changed, and that explains why performance is improving. But it’s fine to be skeptical, because otherwise it [les performances biaisées par le dopage] will happen again. »
“It’s so hard to calculate, between the bikes that go faster, the nutrition that has changed between now and ten years ago”, believes Thibaut Pinot, winner of three stages on the Grande Boucle. If the profile of the climbed passes remains the same, it is impossible to measure the influence of climatic differences (wind and temperature), the length of the stages and the placement of said passes on the route to make reliable comparisons between today’s performances. today and those of the past. “In the Grand Colombier [dans l’Ain, arrivée de la 13e étape, le 14 juillet]there was a strong tailwind, it’s hard to analyze »completes the climber of the Groupama-FDJ training.
For the rest, no material evidence has, for the time being, come to support the doubts weighing on the performance of the leaders of the Tour 2023.
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