16/07/2024

"Tadej Pogacar is doing Tadej Pogacar things" - Game over for Jonas Vingegaard at 2024 Tour de France says Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong, as he does every day after each stage of the 2024 Tour de France, discussed with his colleagues on his podcast The Move, George Hincapie and Bradley Wiggins what happened during a historic queen stage on Sunday.

The Texan summed up Tadej Pogacar's superiority over Jonas Vingegaard and the rest of his rivals on the Bastille Day stage with brutal simplicity: "Tadej is doing Tadej things."

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Hincapie explained that everyone in the peloton knew that Team Visma | Lease a Bike were going to set a very strong pace on all the climbs, in order to see if Vingegaard could drop Pogacar and that was what happened and in their opinion at least, completely sealed the Tour. "Today we knew Visma was going to pull from the start, everybody knew it in the peloton that they were going to do it, we can now sit here and criticize that tactic, but I like that aggressiveness," Hincapie analyses. "Pogacar is better, I think today Pogacar has won the Tour unless something weird happens."

Armstrong, for his part, believes UAE Team Emirates did the right thing. After several days of playing kamikaze, yesterday they let their rivals work so that in the end Pogacar destroyed his rival: "We've been very critical of the tactics and the aggressiveness, but today he raced perfectly," assesses the controversial American. "We're going to let them control, we're going to let them get their race going and what had to happen happened."

"We never saw Pogacar going to the limit with the attack," Hincapie adds.

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Sir Bradley Wiggins is one of those who thinks that with the two stars of world cycling at 100% Vingegaard would beat Pogacar and that is why, the Slovenian decided to ride the Giro d'Italia this year. In the current circumstances, it is clear to him that it doesn't matter what tactics Visma uses because the Dane is a level below the Slovenian after his crash in the Itzulia Basque Country earlier this year however:

"I think Visma did what they had to do, they were in Pogacar's hands, they had to try something different. Even if Visma was 100 percent, the result was going to be the same, because this depends on Jonas being 100 percent, and he's not."