Tour de France: Pogacar beats Wyngaard to win yellow on stage four tour de france 2024

Tadej Pogacar won the first mountain stage of the 2024 Tour de France, from Pinerolo to Valloyer, defeating defending champion Jonas Wingegaard on the summit of the Col du Galibier.

“I wanted to hit hard today,” Pogacar said after his 12th career Tour stage win. “That was the plan and we executed it really well.”

The two rivals once again faced off in the mountains, but this time UAE Team Emirates leader Pogacar had the upper hand, climbing and descending faster than the Dane, gaining a 35-second lead on the high-speed drop. Line.

“I didn’t want to go too early because of the wind,” Pogačar said of his attack near Galibier’s 2,642-metre summit. “So I had to make all the difference in the last few hundred metres.”

Downhill or uphill, Pogacar had more power than his rivals and increased his advantage by accelerating towards Valloire. “I know the downhill, but I was a little surprised by the wet road in the first few corners, so it was a little scary. “But it’s a very quick descent and it helps if you know the road too.”

During his forced layoff from racing from mid-April to late June, no matter what Wingegaard and his Visma Lease-A-Bike team did for him, it was not enough.

With the bonus seconds, Pogacar now leads the race overall, by 45 seconds over Soudal Quick-Step’s Remco Evenepoel, with Wingegaard in third overall, 50 seconds behind, after only four stages.

Wingegaard said: “It’s a shame to waste time, but to be honest, when we came into the Tour, we expected to be behind after these first four stages. By wasting time on just one of them, I think we could be quite happy.

“Today I lost most of the time on the second part of the slope where the weight matters a little more,” said the Dane. “Tadej has a little more gravity. It worked for him and I have to admit that.

On the suggestion that he was already 1-0 down, Vingegaard replied: “Yeah, but we expected to be 3-0 down, so I think it’s a small victory. We are confident in our plan so we will see till the end of the tour.

However, there is a growing sense that Evenepoel has already overtaken Wingegaard as the main challenger to double Tour winner Pogacar, even though he admitted it was not his cup of tea to follow the Slovenian on the final climb. “It was clear that I didn’t have the speed in my legs that he had,” said the Belgian.

Nor, as it turned out, did Wingegaard, who feigned betrayal after Pogacar’s attack on the stage in Bologna on Sunday. The Dane is still a few percentage points short of his best, as is his wobbly Visma Lease-a-Bike team, which, after winning all three Grand Tours in 2023, risks a blank sheet in 2024.

Even in the final sprint to the line in Valloire, Wingegaard looked tired, failing to close the gap to Evenepoel and losing a further two seconds.

Winner of the world time trial title in Scotland last year, Evenepoel now awaits the Tour’s first time trial next Friday. “It’s always positive when you finish second to the best rider in the world,” he said.

For Richard Carapaz, his first experience of racing in the yellow jersey went sour in the final kilometers of the Galibier, when he almost certainly lost. EF Education Easy Post’s Carapaz finished more than five minutes behind Pogacar, his hopes of a podium finish dashed with just 25 km of racing left.

It was a bitter disappointment for the Ecuadorians, but then for most of the peloton, with the Slovenians on the rampage, everything was downhill. Now Vingegaard and his depleted teammates must ensure their Tour campaign does not follow the same trajectory.