There was a sense of deflation after stage five of this year’s Tour de France. On the first real mountain test, Jumbo-Visma’s Jonas Vingegaard, the defending champion, had put a significant amount of time into his main rival, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates).
There was a fear that the race was already over, that the Dane would be too dominant. As Pogačar himself said the next day, if the same thing happened again, he might as