Tadej Pogacar on the day that cost him the 2022 Tour de France: "If you do eight sprints that just takes too much"

Tadej Pogacar had won the 2020 and 2021 Tour de France editions and was the man to beat in 2022, but struggled on one particular day. Stage 11 to the Col du Granon was a brutal day for the Slovenian where he had to respond to an all-out Visma attack; attacked himself on the Col du Galibier; and then cracked completely on the final climb to lose time that he would then never get back again.

Up until that point, Pogacar was racing like he always does, taking several wins in the days leading up to stage 11 and carrying the yellow jersey. On that brutal mountain day, Primoz Roglic and Jonas Vingegaard each attacked several times before the final climb of the day and had the support of several riders they had in the breakaway. It was a strong tactic, put into place by a team with both quality and smarts. Pogacar did at the time managed to respond to these, but he believes his biggest mistake was in trying to match all accelerations.

"Where I made my mistake, I shouldn't follow Roglic immediately there on the Telegraphe. It was Tiesj Benoot and Christophe Laporte who were with him on the downhill and they just flew down and when we started the Galibier they just go one by one," Pogacar said in an interview with Peter Attia. "I had to respond to eight or nine attacks. I was really good but I think there; but if you do eight sprints that just takes too much. Then I tried to respond by being stupid and I tried to drop everyone from the wheel on Galibier but then yeah I knew that Wout van Aert is also in front and it's check-mate anyway. It was just stupid from me".

Attacking simply was not an option whilst he was surrounded by his biggest rivals from all sides. Whilst at the time it didn't seem too costly, after the descent the riders would still climb the very steep and high-altitude Col du Granon. Here the yellow jersey simply had no legs to match another powerful attack from Jonas Vingegaard. Pogacar cracked in unusual form on that climb and lost 2:51 minutes on the Dane. He recovered the next day but Vingegaard's consistency did not permit Pogacar to take that time back, resulting in a second place when the peloton reached Paris. 

"I think I ate enough, but you cannot eat enough when you do so much," Pogacar laments. "You do so much power, so much attacking, you cannot take more food than what you can... Yeah we had quite a good plan for nutrition, but if you do too much with your body you cannot replace that.