Visma DS doesn't panic over loss of 50 seconds: "We had expected this to happen, and we have to make do with it"

Jonas Vingegaard was the only rider to come at least close to following Tadej Pogacar's acceleration on Col du Galibier, however even the mighty Dane came short to his Slovenian counterpart after a short while. The gap between the two even further deepened in the long descent to Valloire, with Vingegaard eventually arriving 37 seconds behind Pogacar, who also grabbed another 13 bonification seconds along the way.

What did Visma | Lease a Bike manager Grischa Niermann learn from the first mountain stage in this Tour? "The conclusion is that Pogacar had a splitting attack in the last few hundred meters of the Galibier," the German ex-pro told WielerFlits. "Jonas just couldn’t keep up. He eventually lost some time on the descent. We had expected this to happen, and we have to make do with it."

Vingegaard lost nearly a minute to Pogacar at the finish in Valloire. A setback? "I don’t know. If you had told us last Friday that we would be fifty seconds behind Pogacar after four days... We have to be very happy with that," Niermann counters.

The German tactician assures the race is still far from over and that we're yet to see much more from Vingegaard in remainining 17 stages. "It's a bit of a setback for now, but we also knew this was possible. We've been saying this from the start of the Tour. We're sure Jonas will come in even better, but today Pogacar was just better."

Niermann also looked at the strength of UAE Emirates, Pogacar's team, who had Juan Ayuso and Joao Almeida also in the mix with the favourites. "I didn't expect anything else. They have a super strong team, but we already knew that. You could say: Adam Yates had to let go and that is unexpected. I had previously expected a situation in which four UAE riders would be in the top ten."