"Is this your all-or-nothing plan?" - Tom Dumoulin questions Vingegaard & Visma

Team Visma | Lease a Bike give it a crack on stage 18 of the 2025 Tour de France, but ultimately proved unable to break Tadej Pogacar, or even really put any severe pressure on the Maillot Jaune. As a result, with just three stages left, Jonas Vingegaard’s hopes of another Maillot Jaune look over.

Whilst Visma did, as mentioned, go on the attack on stage 18, whether they really did the all-out attack many had hoped for isn't something their former rider Tom Dumoulin agrees with at all. "They didn't play all-or-nothing," Dumoulin says in De Avondetappe on Dutch broadcaster NOS. "I thought: What are they doing? Is this your all-or-nothing plan?"

Visma had gone hard on the middle climb of the day, isolating Pogacar, with Vingegaard still having Matteo Jorgenson for company in the valley to the final climb of the day at the Col de la Loze. That was when things stalled though, as Jorgenson attacked and went up the road again, the Vingegaard - Pogacar group came to a near stand still, allowing the dropped domestiques of UAE to get back into contact ahead of the final climb, nullifying Visma's earlier move.

"When you start a stage with such big words and you ride the last climb slower than the breakaway, you can't say it was all or nothing," Dumoulin assesses sharply of his former team, noting how Ben O’Connor, who had spent all day out front, survived to take the stage 18 win. "Perhaps we must conclude that Vingegaard didn't have the legs."

Ahead of stage 19 and the final bit of Alpine climbing in the 2025 Tour de France, Vingegaard now has a 4:26 deficit to make up to Pogacar in the general classification, something that by all estimations seems nigh on impossible for the Dane.