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 minutes and 21 seconds 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 the question every year," recalled Tadej Pogacar, during the press conference organized on Monday by his team, UAE Emirates. “We ride fast, we go full throttle every step of the way. People are questioning themselves because of the past [of cycling]. 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, n is never far.
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 minutes and 27 seconds to overcome the last difficulty, the climb of Bettex (7 kilometers at 7.7%, 1st category). A speed record: 42 seconds less than the previous record, set by four-time Tour winner Chris Froome.
"It's OK to be skeptical"
Already the day before, the two men had been faster – by five seconds – than Marco Pantani, in 1997, on the first ten kilometers of the Col de Joux Plane (11.6 kilometers at 8.5%, out of category). But the Slovenian and the Dane having measured themselves on the last 1,600 meters of the ascent, to try 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.
"It's true that we go fast, even faster than [certain proven cheaters]," Vingegaard admitted on Sunday, adding that he was not taking any banned products. Before arguing: “Equipment, nutrition, training, everything has changed, and that explains why performance is improving. But it's good to be skeptical, because otherwise it [doping-biased performance] will happen again. »
"It's so difficult to calculate, between the bikes that go faster, the nutrition that has changed between today and ten years ago," said 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 [in Ain, arrival of the 13th stage, July 14], there was a strong tailwind, it's hard to analyze", adds the climber from 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.
