INSIDE THE TOUR'S ALPINE AMBUSH

How do you beat the best rider of a generation? By setting a trap and luring him in. Chris Marshall-Bell speaks to those who engineered Tadej Pogačar's 2022 Tour downfall

- Chris Marshall-Bell

Cycling was still taking its collective breath, still trying to fathom what it had just witnessed and figure out how this almighty dethroning had come about, when the casualty came forward and provided no answer.

“I suffered all the way to the end,” he said, through gasps and pants, “and I don’t know what happened.”

The victim was Tadej Pogačar. The defending champion and two-time winner had just been the subject of the most brutal ambush in recent Tour de France history by the coordinated team effort of JumboVisma, spearheaded by their own Mr Indomitable, Jonas Vingegaard.

“At the Galibier I was still so good,” Pogačar resumed. “I got a lot of attacks from Jumbo-Visma, and then in the last climb I just didn’t have good legs.” It was quite an understatement.

On stage 11’s final ascent, the narrow, steep Col du Granon, Pogačar, who until then had looked invincible, was distanced with almost five kilometres still to race. He lost a staggering two minutes and 51 seconds to Vingegaard and ceded the yellow jersey that he’d never get back.

Back in his home in Spain, Pogačar’s coach Iñigo San Millán spent the evening of Wednesday, 13 July looking at his star rider’s numbers. “I could see that his numbers [on the Granon] were normal until… Boom!” San Millán recounts, dramatically throwing open his hands to replicate an exploding bomb. “The lights just went out.” Was it a drastic fall in power? “Yeah, yeah a lot,” he replies. From 6W/kg to 4.5W/kg, for example? “Less. When I analysed, I just saw at 4.63km to go he went boom, and everything dropped. That’s where you see the minutes rolling and rolling and rolling away.”