Unflappable Roglic needs only to swerve disaster to secure Tour title
Leader unfazed as team director is thrown off the race Choice of bike on final day will be left to ‘the last moment’
Primoz Roglic is pretty much inscrutable at the best of times; his face, like his riding style, measured always and calm.
When he is wearing a face mask, it is well-nigh impossible to tell what he is thinking.
So when the 30-year-old Tour de France champion-elect was asked yesterday for his reaction to the fact that his sports director at JumboVisma, Merijn Zeeman, had been thrown off the race for “intimidating” and “insulting” a UCI official who was trying to check his bike for possible mechanical doping, unsurprisingly, he did not give much away.
“Um, yeah. For sure we are not happy with it,” Roglic answered. “It’s not a good situation for us. For me it was a big surprise. I wasn’t there when it happened, so it’s very hard to comment on any of this. But definitely it’s not nice that he cannot be here any more.”
It was consistent with Roglic’s response to pretty much everything that has been thrown at him at this race, on or off the road: unflappable, unexcitable, dour even.
It may help to explain why some struggle to warm to him and why there has perhaps been less fuss made about Roglic than some of the other winners in recent years – for that is surely what he is about to become.
Roglic will be crowned Slovenia’s first Tour champion in Paris unless something truly disastrous befalls him in today’s individual time trial.
Stage 19, yesterday, from Bourgen-bresse to Champagnole, produced few fireworks in the general classification battle. Danish rider Soren Kragh Andersen ultimately
claimed his second victory of the race – and Sunweb’s third – attacking brilliantly from a 12-man breakaway 16 kilometres from the finish and racing to the line on his own, some 53 seconds ahead of Luka Mezgec (Mitchelton-scott).
But behind him, all remained calm. Jumbo-visma’s rivals knew there was little they could do to match the strength of the Dutch super team on what was a hot and relatively flat day. They considered it better to save their energies for today’s 36.2km effort against the clock.
Not that anyone is going to catch Roglic. Only fellow Slovenian Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates) has any chance. But 57 seconds is a lot to give away against one of the strongest time-trial riders in the peloton. He is one of its best climbers, which is handy when the last 6km of today’s course heads uphill at an average gradient of over eight per cent. So steep is the finish on La Planche des Belles Filles that many riders are contemplating switching from time-trial bikes to road bikes at the foot of the climb. Roglic was giving nothing away on that score, either, saying he would decide “at the last moment”.
Either way, Slovenia is likely to supply the top two finishers at this year’s Tour, which is pretty extraordinary. Eyebrows will inevitably be raised. This is cycling after all. How does a country the size of Wales, with a population of only two million people, suddenly produce the two top riders at the Tour de France?
That is not to say anything is amiss, merely that there is lingering, healthy scepticism. The fact is Slovenian cycling has had its share of doping scandals in recent years. Some of its riders were caught up in Operation Aderlass, the recent Austrian doping probe. Any doubters may be tempted to point to the six-month Covid lockdown when out-of-competition testing was patchy at best.
Former French rider Romain Feillu told the Ouest-france newspaper he could not believe what he was seeing. “Pas normal,” he said, adding that he did not think Slovenia, as a nation, “have had the same [anti-doping] education as us”.
Every Tour champion of the last few years has been asked about his credibility: Chris Froome, Vincenzo Nibali, Geraint Thomas and Egan Bernal – Roglic will be no different.
Without evidence of wrongdoing, however, he deserves to be celebrated like any other Tour winner.
Roglic and his team have ridden brilliantly and no doubt he will handle any questions in his usual unflappable way. He has already been asked, at this Tour, about his credibility, and about his team’s use of controversial ketones supplement.
He was open about the latter and typically calm about the former. “They do a lot of [doping] controls,” he said after his performance on the Grand Colombier last weekend.
“I think there’s nothing to hide. Looking from my side, you can definitely trust it.”