Tour de France, Pogacar like Hinault: after 42 years he wins two mountain stages in a row

It is unknown if Tadej Pogacar will leave better cycling when he leaves it. It is not known just why the Slovenian is 22 and what he is doing may be accompanied by the gerund for a long time. Pogacar won two stages in a row with an uphill finish wearing the yellow jersey, refreshing the last time it was in 1979 with Hinault (let’s remove everything from the Armstrong era).

Statistics that make history

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And he did it in front of Emmanuel Macron, the president of the French Republic who went up to Luz Ardiden to closely observe the umpteenth pedaling of a phenomenon. Yellow shirt, polka dot shirt and white shirt on his shoulders for the second year in a row. Material to study, material that in the meantime will end up in the history books of sport. The Tour virtually ends here, with the last finish in the Pyrenees. From tomorrow to Sunday there will be two finishes for sprinters and in the middle a time trial that will cause some jolts behind Pogacar. Few, to tell the truth, because in the general classification Jonas Vingegaard is 5’45 “behind and Richard Carapaz 5’51”: those six seconds are destined to increase, yes, but for the Dane who will finish second in Paris. Down from the podium, with the collapse of Rigoberto Uran, the gaps are such as to make a reshuffling impossible (Ben O’Connor has almost two and a half minutes from Carapaz). The Tour thus crystallizes the contours of a character who is rewriting statistics and numbers. Pogacar has won 11 races this season alone and at his age (22 years and 297 days) only François Faber had won more stages in the Tour (10 vs 6).