Tadej Pogačar (UAE Emirates) won the bonus sprint atop Galibier and kept going down the descent to outdistance his GC rivals and win by 35 seconds in Valloire. Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) managed to win the sprint for second place, while Pogačar’s teammate, Juan Ayuso, was third.
Pogačar takes the leader’s jersey and is now ahead of his nearest rival, Remco Evenepoel, by 45 seconds, and Jonas Vingegaard by 50 seconds
“To ride on the front, you need to have big balls like we did today,” said Pogačar to the media after the stage. “Hats off to the whole team. For sure, we showed today that we have one of the strongest teams here. To ride like we did today, it’s crazy. We did a super-amazing job. We need to continue like this and be happy.”
Pogačar’s teammate Pavel Sivakov explained their strategy afterwards. “It was the plan from the beginning, from the first stage, to take some time on the other guys on GC with Tadej. I think we did a perfect job. Even with the headwind, we managed to hurt everyone, and it’s super-nice.”
Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) revealed that he expected to lose more time in stage 4 than he did. “I would say I expected to be two minutes down or maybe more, so to be only 50 seconds behind is still quite good. My time will come, or our time will come. I would have liked to close the gap instead of it ending up opening even more. I think for the first part of the downhill I kept the gap then the second part is where gravity helps you out a bit more.”
Of course, I would have liked to stay with him,” Vingegaard added, “but that’s life. To be honest, I’m pretty satisfied as I was also doubting myself going into this Tour. So to only lose time in one out of three stages is more than we could have expected.”
Matteo Jorgenson was the only teammate with Vingegaard before Pogačar attacked. “We wanted to set a hard pace on Galibier. We wanted to make sure that we set a really suffocating pace to reduce Tadej’s explosivity. It was clear that we just didn’t have the numbers to do it. I think the pace wasn’t quite hard enough. That’s what Jonas just told me, so that’s just how it is.”
RESULTS
Stage 4: Pinerolo > Valloire (139.6km)
Results powered by FirstCycling.com
