ANALYSIS: TOUR DE FRANCE 2021
Procycling looks back at the biggest stories of the 108th edition of the world’s greatest race.
Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar picked up where he left off at the end of the 2020 race, dominating his rivals, showing little weakness and avoiding the bad luck that put several key riders out of the running. Procycling contemplates the beginning of the Pogačar era
The rain that soaked the 2021 Tour de France peloton in the two big Alpine stages, to Le Grand-Bornand and Tignes, was an apt metaphor for the effectiveness with which Tadej Pogacar doused the ambitions of his rivals for the yellow jersey in that single weekend. The precipitation was not as dramatic as the highlylocalised deluge that triggered landslides and a truncated race last time the Tour came to Tignes in 2019, but this time a different force of nature bent the race to its will.
As the favourites’ group started the Col de Romme on stage 8, the first mountainous day, race followers could still imagine that the Tour was alive. And theoretically, at that point, it still was, though a week of chaotic racing, crashes and even UAE fluffing their first attempt at holding the race together the previous day had still left Pogacar by far the best-placed of the GC riders, and already 90 seconds clear of the two individuals who would share the final podium with him in Paris, Jonas Vingegaard and Richard Carapaz. But there was a visible and tangible difference between Pogacar and the rest on the Col de Romme. As Ineos tried and failed to set up a mountain train and Pogacar’s last remaining teammate Davide Formolo excruciatingly set a pace which had whittled the group down to a dozen or so, Pogacar looked easy, hands loosely on the brake hoods and his legs spinning without perceivable effort. By contrast, Richie Porte, for example, held his brake hoods in a death grip; even Carapaz looked tense and strained.
Pogacar’s first attack, about four kilometres from the top, did for everybody except Carapaz, but it was clear that the body language displayed by each rider was as different as Ecuadorian Spanish and Slovenian. Pogacar’s cadence remained relaxed enough for him to continue pedalling apparently casually, and he turned around every now and again to inspect the damage he’d left in his wake, while Carapaz fought his bike and stood on the pedals. The second attack, less than a kilometre later, did for the Ineos rider. From that moment, Pogacar stopped looking back.
There was no more defining stage. By the finish, Pogacar had caught almost all the riders in the 18-strong group that had started the Romme six and a half minutes clear of him. He came in 49 seconds behind stage winner Dylan Teuns of Bahrain Victorious. The rest of the GC riders all came in together in a group of nine, 3:19 adrift of the new race leader. That nine-strong group consisted of every rider who would eventually finish between second and 11th on GC, with the exception of Guillaume Martin, who had lost a lot of time in the opening stages and had infiltrated the break. The Frenchman still finished closer to the other GC also-rans than Pogacar. The Tour had split into two unequal halves: Pogacar, and everybody else.
By the day’s finish, only Wout van Aert was within four and a half minutes. A day later, Ag2r’s Ben O’Connor gained six minutes and moved up to second overall, but
a second attack on the summit finish at Tignes put Pogacar over five minutes clear of everybody else.
Pogacar was on a different level. For much of the rest of the race, until the two summit finishes in the Pyrenees and final time trial prised open the gaps a bit more, he sat serenely on a five-minute lead, while the rest of the top 10 were separated by seconds. And since there was no comparison with anybody else in the race, Pogacar’s feat in putting over three minutes into the rest of the GC riders in little more than 30km on stage 8 drew parallels with Eddy Merckx. The great Belgian himself, who had been less than effusive in his praise for Mark Cavendish having equalled his record total of 34 stage wins, was more generous with the Slovenian, forecasting more than five Tour wins for his young successor. L’Équipe also got in on the act, calling Pogacar ‘le Petit Cannibal’.
Pogacar, who looked a little surprised to be the 2020 Tour winner at the time, following his last-ditch turnaround at La Planche des Belles Filles, grew into his role as the new patron of the Tour this year. His double stage win in the Pyrenees showed cannibalistic tendencies, while he even started throwing his weight around in trying to stop breaks going on flat days. The Pogacar era has begun.
Professional cycling has changed, and Pogacar’s emergence as a double Tour winner at the age of 22 is only one aspect of that. Generations come and go, and young riders improve and take over from the previous dominant riders. But something feels different. The faces are changing, but so is the style of racing.
At the Tour, the dominant strategy of the last decade, perfected by Sky/Ineos, has been one of catenaccio and mountain trains. The Sky train set a high pace in the mountain stages, dissuading others from attacking, and Chris Froome, then Geraint Thomas and to a lesser extent Egan Bernal won Tours by attacking not far from the line on the summit finishes.
Things went wrong with this last year, when Jumbo-Visma replicated the Ineos strategy, assuming that the handfuls of seconds and time bonuses that Primož Rogličc was squeezing out on the mountain stages would win them the Tour, not realising that all they were doing was setting up Pogacar’s time trial coup on the penultimate day. For a mountain train to be really effective, your rider has to win.
This year, UAE were visibly not using a mountain train, save for very late in the race when the Tour was already won. When they did, it was in order that Pogacar could get the stage victory he wanted. But it wasn’t the tactic that won him the Tour. Formolo set a good pace for a couple of kilometres on the Romme - if the UAE had a mountain train that day, it was composed of one carriage - but Pogacar’s attack was far bolder than any in Sky or Ineos’s Tour wins (though not quite on a par with Froome’s 2018 Girowinning attack on the Colle delle Finestre). The last time a solo attack of 30km was the Tour-winning exploit was Marco Pantani in 1998, though there are complications with that, given Pantani’s use of performance enhancing drugs.
But here is the thing: it wasn’t just Pogacar. On stage 1, Julian Alaphilippe’s attack came 2.3km from the line on a puncheurs’ finish on the Côte de la Fosse aux Loups, which felt like a long way out. Flèche Wallonne’s Mur de Huy took the riders 2:32 in total to ride up this spring, and Alaphillippe jumped with 45 seconds to go. By comparison, the Frenchman’s attack in Landerneau was at 2.3km to go and the time it took from attack to just before the line, when he started freewheeling, was four minutes, which is a long time to hold an anaerobic effort of the kind it takes to win on a climb. The next day, Mathieu van der Poel attacked on the penultimate climb in Mûrde-Bretagne, with 18km to go, and almost pulled a small group clear. But they were brought back, and it looked like a wasted effort. On the final time up, Nairo Quintana attacked, and Van der Poel chased. Then Sonny Colbrelli jumped and Van der Poel covered that too. Finally Van der Poel jumped on his own to drop everybody and win.
Looking further into the race, at both of Matej Mohoric’s solo stage wins in Le Creusot and Libourne, at Bauke Mollema’s victory in Quillan and Patrick Konrad’s in Saint-Gaudens, each time the rider went for a long-range attack. Longrange attacks have worked in the Tour before, including in the last 10 years, but this year they proliferated. And with the GC battle over with two weeks of the race to go, they were a welcome distraction for fans.
Thibaut Pinot, the former Tour podium finisher who sat out the 2021 race with injury, said at the end of the 2015 Tour, “This race is won on the first few stages nowadays, not in the mountains.” Riders losing the Tour in the opening week is not a new thing, and Pinot did so himself as recently as last year. But the frequency with which several fancied GC riders
were taken out of the running in the many, many crashes of the opening three days still hobbled the 2021 Tour before it got up and running.
The pre-Tour prognostications focused on Primož Rogličc and the four possible Ineos leaders - Carapaz, Thomas, Porte and Tao Geoghegan Hart - as the likeliest challengers to the defending champion. Not only did Roglic crash twice - once very heavily - in the first three days, but many of his team got wiped out in the ‘Allez opi omi’ crash on stage 1. Thomas, Porte and Geoghagan Hart hit the deck or were held up, so that even after three days, Pogacar was
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minutes clear of any of his genuine rivals who could time trial. Carapaz did manage to sail through the carnage on stage 3, when even the young Slovenian was held up briefly, but in retrospect, Pogacar already looked like the Tour winner.
Observers have noted the serenity of Pogacar’s neutral facial expression. Though he’s capable of extremely aggressive acts on the bike, he still looks like a boy, and age and experience have yet to leave their mark on him. There’s no possible scientific basis on which to state that Pogacar, like several dominant Tour winners before him - Indurain, Armstrong*, Froome in his best years and Thomas in 2018 - is simply luckier than his rivals, but nothing seems to touch him. He floated through the Tour’s first week, and no wonder he looked serene, though L’Équipe’s Dominique Issartel detected a more mischievous streak in the Slovenian, referring to him as a “greedy leprechaun” when he started bagging summit finish stage wins in the Pyrenees. But even if there is a concealed edge to Pogacar, his progress through the carnage of the opening week was seamless. When the strongest rider is also the least unlucky, a lot of jeopardy is removed from the competition and when Pogacar won the stage 5 time trial there was a sense of unstoppable progress.
Inevitably and justifiably, ASO came in for criticism about the crashes. There was the sense that the chaos and unpredictability had made the opening week one of the most entertaining for many years, but at the same time, the price paid was in injured riders and weakened teams, and a GC
The frequency with which several fancied GC riders were taken out of the running in the many crashes of the opening three days hobbled the 2021 Tour before it got up and running
contest which never sparked into life. The wisdom of holding the opening stages in Brittany, where the roads tend towards the rural and narrow, was questioned, though the region has hosted grands départs before with fewer incidents, and there’s an argument that wherever the first stages are held, the bunch is nervous, pressured and fighting for space that in many cases is simply not there. The recent trend of GC teams riding at the front all the way to the 3km-to-go mark is a factor in the congestion at the front, even if it’s also true that some of the crashes - Thomas and Roglic on stage 3 being prime examples - happened on straight, wider roads.
However, some of the run-ins were accidents waiting to happen. On stage 3 to Pontivy, there was a narrow and unsighted double left bend with 4.2km to go, with a wide, fast entrance and a wall on the inside, which pushed riders outwards into the road. This pinch point was outside the 3km-togo mark, so the GC teams were involved, as well as the sprint teams, and the crash through the bends, which took Jack Haig out of the race, was predictable and even inevitable. The crashes ruined the Tour twice: once in causing avoidable and unnecessary injuries to the riders, then in killing the race for the yellow jersey.
David Brailsford promised in Milan at the end of the 2020 Giro d’Italia, that we’d be seeing a new Ineos in 2021. Giddy from the surprise win of Geoghegan Hart in that race, he waxed lyrical about shutting down the team’s mountain train and becoming a more aggressive, attacking operation. (Never mind that Geoghegan Hart had won the maglia rosa with a defensive ride in the mountains, safely sheltered behind his team-mate Rohan Dennis, then clinching the race in the time trial.)
Spring of 2021 came and went, and the team won a lot of stage races, including a third Giro in four years through Bernal, but in each case the team won through strength in numbers and by having the strongest rider. However, the
Tour would have to be different. None of their riders was as strong as Pogacar, but the strength in depth offered by bringing Giro winners Carapaz and Geoghegan Hart, plus 2018 Tour champ Thomas and last year’s Tour third-placer Porte, could conceivably beat the Slovenian. It would take imaginative and aggressive tactics, but it would be possible.
In short, the plan would be to isolate Pogacar from his team, and attack long, in the hope that he couldn’t cover all four riders.
The plan, if it was even a formally adopted one in the first place, didn’t make it past stage 1 and arguably not as far as that. In his pre-Tour interviews Porte talked of his aim to avoid pressure and ride for the team, while he and Geoghegan Hart lost minutes on the first day. To beat the strongest rider with the strongest team, the riders in the strongest team need to be in a good position, and from stage 1, Ineos were not going to beat Pogacar that way. When Thomas crashed two days later, Ineos had to adopt a single leader strategy, and hope that Carapaz could beat Pogacar in a head-to-head fight.
The starkest evidence that this was not going to be possible, beyond the Slovenian putting three minutes into him on stage 8, was on the summit finish of the Col de Portet. The stage had been whittled down to three riders: Pogacar Vingegaard and Carapaz, and the Ineos rider feigned exhaustion in the final kilometres, only to miraculously come to life when he attacked to try to win the stage. The manoeuvre seemed to irritate Pogacar and Vingegaard, though it was an entirely legitimate one. Carapaz’s strength is in his ability to read races and in the element of surprise - he’s a Giro title to the good because of this, but his tactics in the Pyrenees smacked of having admitted defeat.
The more surprising tactical initiative was from his team, however. Ineos had no reason to ride hard in the Pyrenean stages, but they set up trains on both
the Andorran stage and on the two summit finishes. All they were doing was setting up a straight test of strength between Carapaz and Pogacar, and though their efforts did result in third place overall, the Tour was largely seen as a failure for the British team, especially compared to their previous results. Their 2020 accounts were published midway through the 2021 Tour, and race followers might have been forgiven for wondering if third place at the Tour is worth the 50 million euro investment. They came nowhere near winning a stage and Carapaz’s two Pyrenean third places were the closest they got, while the rest of the team were being burned up to defend a podium finish that Carapaz would probably have achieved whoever did the riding. By comparison, Jumbo-Visma, who’d suffered even more bad luck in crashes and were down to four riders by the end of the Tour, put their GC reserve Vingegaard into second overall, and won four stages.
For the most part, the 2021 Tour was dominated by a few riders. Mainly the four key protagonists were Pogacar, quadruple stage winner Cavendish, early yellow jersey Van der Poel, and Wout Van Aert, who took a rare ‘perfect hat trick’ of stage wins - one mountain stage, one time trial and one sprint.
For ASO, this can be considered a success - these are four of the biggest names in the sport, and for their race to be defined by their exploits is good for business. Cavendish, in particular, created an irresistible narrative of redemption and history-making by ending a five-year Tour stage win drought and equalling Merckx’s record.
However, the lack of real jeopardy in the yellow jersey contest, and Pogacar taking the King of the Mountains because of the weighting ASO gave to the two Pyrenean summit finishes, left a sense that the race had relied heavily on these four and on the battle for breakaway wins to create narrative. The KOM competition in particular had been a highlight. While Pogacar spent the entire race in the white jersey and most of it in yellow, with no threats, and Cavendish was pretty safe in green, the polka-dot jersey saw a four-way battle between Wout Poels, Nairo Quintana, Michael Woods and Van Aert, which went all the way to the Pyrenees before Pogacar wrapped it up on two climbs. Purists argued that the best climber should win the polka-dot jersey, though it risks becoming a shoo-in for whoever wins yellow. It’s a points competition on climbs, and ASO’s weighting towards the big summit finishes pulled the rug out from beneath the competition.
There was also a marked lack of ambition and ability with most of the top 10. O’Connor and Martin both yo-yoed up and down with industrious attacks, but many riders looked happy to be there, and simply rode as hard as they could to hold their position. Wilco Kelderman and Enric Mas, in fifth and sixth, showed little attacking initiative; then again, they were far enough away from the podium that to try and move up the standings would have been a risk, for no gain. The GC riders also continued a theme from the last few Tours and used the middle mountain stages, to Le Creusot, Quillan and SaintGaudens, as a day off hostilities.
This is perhaps the clearest evidence of all that the peloton is relaxing into the Pogacar era. What’s also clear: to beat him in 2022, everything is going to have to go right for his rivals.
Cavendish in particular, created an irresistible narrative of redemption and history-making by ending a fiveyear Tour stage win drought