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Tour de France worries emerge for Pogacar after illness sweeps through team
Richard Carapaz won stage 18 of the Tour de France after a breakaway group of six riders duelled their way to the winter sports station at Orcières-Merlette, but uncertainty surrounds the health of race leader Tadej Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates XRG, which has been swept by a virus since Monday’s rest day.
After Adam Yates’s stage-long calvary on the road to Voiron, Pogacar’s team was further weakened by the abandonment of his American colleague, Brandon McNulty, who quit the Tour with 21km of Thursday’s stage remaining.
Two more of Pogacar’s teammates, Tim Wellens and Florian Vermeersch, also appeared to struggle at times during the stage, which included five categorised climbs, including the final seven-kilometre ascent to the finish.
Speaking at the stage start in Voiron, Wellens suggested other riders within the team were unwell and revealed that he had a sore throat. Seen through the lens of Friday and Saturday’s mountain-top finishes on Alpe d’Huez, Pogacar, despite his 4m 32s lead over second-placed Remco Evenepoel, has reason to be worried.
“I’m sad that Brandon could not finish. We will see in the next two days but Adam is getting better, and tomorrow, we will go with the flow,” Pogacar said. “I think we can manage. It’s the third week, all the teams are suffering. There are bodies everywhere on a stage like today. We will keep fighting and I believe we can do it.”
Read Jeremy Whittle’s full report from stage 18:
Here’s the official visualisation of what the riders are taking on today:
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William Fotheringham’s stage guide
William Fotheringham
Stage 19, Friday 24 July: Gap to l’Alpe d’Huez, 127.9km
This Tour’s most prestigious mountain stage finish; with a stage this short, it will be touch and go for the day’s escape to make it to the finish. That said, the opening 25km over the Cols Bayard and du Noyer are tough enough to allow a decent move to get established and then there are 60km until the Col d’Ornon, where Pogacar and Vingegaard will probably get their teams moving. If the big two give a move some leeway, the 21 hairpins to the finish will suit a pure climber such as Netcompany’s Thymen Arensman, a double stage winner last year.
Preamble
On the face of it Tadej Pogacar going into a marque mountain stage with a four and a half minute lead would mean only one thing but the extent of the illness sweeping through the UAE Team Emirates XRG camp is becoming hilariously muddled, with staff are saying things only to be contradicted by those on the bikes. Most notably Tim Wellens, who only just finished stage 18 inside the time cut before telling reporters that the riders ate alone in their rooms the previous night and that it was “pretty clear there is some illness in the team”. That much was evident from Adam Yates’ visible struggles over the past few days and the abandonment of Brandon McNulty on the road to Orcières-Merlette. McNulty, who looked awful during the pre-stage presentation in Voiron, had to climb off his bike, cut drift and alone after 50km.
Unless Pogacar himself is seriously ill this will not change the calculus of the general classification too much. Even without his usual cohort of high quality lieutenants the Slovenian is more than capable of seeing this through the final few stages and his rivals are not exactly paragons of strength either. However, it had been assumed that Pogacar would be attacking the first of two assaults on Alpe d’Huez. The first, today, is a short 127km stage that goes uphill from kilometre zero and appeared primed for Pogacar to go after Marco Pantani’s record time for an ascent of the famous mountain. He may well still go for it, but that certainly seems riskier without a fully functioning team around him.
What else does this mean? Well it certainly increases the chances for a breakaway success as UAE Team Emirates XRG will not be able to control the peloton to the same levels as they have for much of this race. It also means today goes from being a stage where it was all about how much Pogacar would win by to becoming a test of his ability to fend for himself. He’s Pogacar, so the concern is not too great, but it’s not the scenario he would have envisioned.
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