Special Envoy to Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc
Launched in a formidable showdown for the final victory in Paris, Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar continue to impress observers, to the point of even making some of the skeptical public wonder about these performances which relegate the competition very far. The Dane, for example, set a new record for the climb in the Marie Blanque pass during the fifth stage. According to the statistics established by NTT Data, which accumulates data on the event, the yellow jersey took 20’57” to swallow the ascent while Tadej Pogacar, former record holder in 2020, had climbed it in 22’24”!
At the end of the fifteenth stage on Sunday, the leader of the Jumbo Visma did not shirk when raising suspicions of doping, like last year the day before the arrival in Paris, when he hammered that his team “was clean”. Vingegaard, often not very forthcoming in his answers, even lingered on the question. “Yes, I completely understand that people are skeptical. We have to be skeptical about what happened in the past. If we don’t think about it, it will happen again, “said the Scandinavian before assuring with confidence: “I’m not taking anything.
Vingegaard went on to try to explain why overall performance has only improved over the years, even from what was established in the early 2000s when doping cases broke one after another. “It’s true that we are going faster, that everything is improving, nutrition, equipment and training. All of this is different from the past, which explains why performance is improving, but it’s still good to think about what happened before and to be skeptical, ”concluded the yellow jersey on the subject.
