Tour de France 2022 Opinion: Ailing UAE Team Emirates miss a trick as Tadej Pogacar keeps hold of yellow

A cloud hung above UAE Team Emirates as the Tour de France resumed on Tuesday following news that their Inside Man, former Jumbo-Visma rider George Bennett, had been ruled out because of a positive Covid test. The Kiwi climber joined Norway’s Vegard Stake Laengen on the sidelines as the two-time champion and race leader Tadej Pogacar went down to just five support riders.

It could have been worse had key mountain lieutenant Rafal Majka – the rider whose back wheel Pogacar has stuck to solidly this past week – gone the same way after his own positive test. But the Pole was not deemed contagious enough to warrant exclusion – even though we probably won’t see Pogacar riding so gamely in his slipstream for a while.

Still, with Majka sick and Marc Hirschi in perpetual conflict with the back of the peloton, Pogacar rode towards the plush ski resort of Megeve and the impending high Alps with very much a skeleton staff at his disposal.

Not that he was anywhere near them, mind. With Majka pulling on the front of the peloton alongside Marc Soler and Brandon McNulty, Pogacar safely ensconced himself further back in the pack, leaving his rivals at Ineos Grenadiers, Jumbo-Visma and Movistar to play UAE exhalations bingo.

And can you blame him? The 23-year-old is pushing for a third consecutive Tour de France crown with only a slender 39-second lead over his closest challenger, Jonas Vingegaard. He wants to beat the Dane fair and square – not hand it to him on a proverbial platter with a positive PCR test.

It was a tense first half to the stage after a rather lacklustre opening, with no break forming until 65km had been ridden but with UAE duo Hirschi and Mikkel Bjerg off the back early – leaving Pogacar, at one point, to close the gap when a split occurred in the pack. Tom Pidcock, the man keeping Pogacar’s white jersey warm and one of three British riders from Ineos in the top 10, was on the right side of the move and he was too dangerous a prospect to let loose up the road.

Lennard Kamna, on the other hand, fitted the bill as potential yellow jersey borrower. The German trailed Pogacar by 8’43” going into the stage, and while a breakaway artist to be reckoned with in the mountains, his Giro-weary legs will probably exclude him from being a GC factor in the grand scheme of things.

When the 25-man move went and Kamna was the best placed rider in it, UAE Team Emirates sat up and Pogacar gave the breakaway his blessing. The pace eased enough to allow Bjerg back on and soon the gap had gone up to seven minutes. It grew even further after protesters forced the race to be neutralised – hitting the magic nine minutes that granted Kamna the virtual yellow jersey ahead of the final climb to the Megeve altiport.

It couldn't have been a much better scenario for UAE than that. And after all the early stresses of day, Pogacar didn’t look too rundown while he was waiting for the race to restart…

Kamna faded on the final climb and could only take 10th place in the stage – narrowly won by the moustachioed Dane, Magnus Cort – before being forced to wait for what seemed like an eternity to see whether or not his efforts would be rewarded with the maillot jaune. Then, for the second time in four days, the German had his heart broken by the sight of the yellow jersey sprinting clear with his big Danish rival, Vingegaard.

It seems like Pogacar just cannot help himself once he hits a slightly ramped finale – he wants to throw the hammer down and try to take time off his rivals. The upshot was that he held onto the jersey by 11 seconds on Kamna, whose meteoric rise 19 places to second could not hide his disappointment on missing out on a rare chance to lead the world’s biggest bike race four days after his nightmare at La Super Planches des Belles Filles.

There was a sense of disappointment about the UAE camp, too. For by retaining his race lead, Pogacar had unwittingly signed his team on for the traditional duty of respecting the yellow jersey on what will probably be the two most important stages of the race: the back-to-back summit showdowns on the Col du Granon and Alpe d’Huez.

To quote Romain Bardet, who dropped one place to seventh after Kamna’s coup: "Even when Pogacar wants to lose yellow, that doesn't happen."

In hindsight, this seems like a very poor decision – whether one made collectively by an ailing team on the ropes or individually by a rider who is a natural born competitor. The most important thing in Stage 11 was for Pogacar not to lose any time to his rivals ahead of far bigger challenges ahead. That a scenario arose in which they could concede the yellow jersey to someone not deemed a threat, but that opportunity was passed up, seems incredibly short-sighted, nay, a gaffe of extreme proportions.

Pogacar could have skipped on press duties, could have been only recognisable for the tufts of hair in his helmet. The spotlight could have been taken off his struggling team, the onus on defending the yellow jersey removed from an already rising to-do list further compounded by the extreme heat and the mounting pressure from both Ineos and Jumbo, both of whom currently enjoying a full complement of riders.

It’s unsure whether there was a miscalculation involved or if Pogacar simply couldn’t bring himself to performing such a calculated and seemingly negative tactic. He inferred during his interview that UAE’s rival teams intentionally upped the tempo on the final climb. And so they might. For keeping Pogacar in yellow while the Slovenian’s support is so careworn was undoubtedly shrewd.

“At first we don’t want to lose it, then we want to lose it. Kind of. But in the end, it all worked out like it did and I’m still happy that I’m in the yellow jersey,” Pogacar thought out loud during his post-stage interview.

Pogacar said he had much admiration for the man whom he should probably have loaned his yellow jersey, admitting that it “would have been nice for him” had “a real stage hunter” like Kamna, “one of the best breakaway specialists,” taken the yellow jersey.

But it was not to be. Pogacar’s pride and innate competitiveness took over – despite his team begging through their masks for a day off yellow jersey duties and a chance to recalibrate.

Pogacar admitted that the Tour’s first finish on the Col du Granon since 1986 would be “brutal” but said he was “looking forward to it”. He then added, tellingly: “I’m happy to be in yellow for these two toughest mountain stages of the Tour.”

And perhaps there lies the key in all this. While sense dictates that he would have been better off relinquishing the yellow jersey to a non-rival – if even for a day – is it not inconceivable that Pogacar’s need for a strong and fit team has been overestimated; that his inability to perform in intense heat has been overexaggerated; that his rival Vingegaard’s supposed preference for these longer, tougher, higher Alpine climbs such as the Galibier or the Granon has been overblown?

Perhaps Pogacar simply wants to make sure that when he completes another hat-trick of stage wins on a mountaintop only once used as a finish before, he does so in yellow – if only to ensure that, 24 hours later, when he adds his name to one of Alpe d’Huez’s famous 21 hairpin bends, that he does so in yellow, to mirror one of his big rivals this year, the Welshman Geraint Thomas, who achieved this rare feat in 2018.

All this talk of Pogacar and UAE missing a trick in failing to concede the yellow jersey presupposes Pogacar being in some grave danger when, really, he could simply be waiting to strike the killer blow. Besides, what does it say about Pogacar’s status as a modern-day Cannibal if he needs the help of Lennard Kamna and Bora-Hansgrohe in his quest for cycling immortality?

- -

Stream the 2022 Tour de France and the rest of the cycling season live and on demand on discovery+