Tadej Pogacar's Tour de France can be characterized with number 5 as we enter the final time trial today. Fifth Tour de France participation, fifth podium, five minutes of lead in GC and five stage victories. The latter doesn't sit well with his opponents, who openly speak about greediness. But ironically it's quite often Visma | Lease a Bike who're the loudest critics, almost as if they'd forgot about last year's Vuelta a Espana...
"I didn't hear them say that last year. It's a bit of the language of the sore loser," Patrick Lefevere says in HLN, when confronted with quotes from his Visma | Lease a Bike counterpart Merijn Zeeman. The sports director openly asked himself whether Pogacar wasn't too greedy in this Tour.
On the other end of the wire, Thijs Zonneveld calls Pogacar 'a bit arrogant' in his column in the AD, about the fact that he actually wanted to give away stage 20. In the end, Zonneveld believes it was for everyone's good that Pogacar took the stage. Gifting a stage to Vingegeaard would've been "arrogant and humiliating" according to the journalist.
He further explains: "Giving your biggest competitor a stage as if you don't give a damn: ugly. As if you let your 5-year-old nephew win a game of Stratego because otherwise he'll start crying again. Giving a stage to someone with whom you've been fighting a life-and-death battle for every second for four years, that's a turd wrapped in gift paper. But criticizing a multiple winner because he wins a lot, that hits like a tuna on a drum kit."
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