Did the Tour de France peloton do the right thing? Should they have waited for Tadej Pogačar when he crashed with six kilometres remaining of stage 11?
After clipping the back wheel of Uno-X Mobility’s Tobias Halland Johanssen with under 4km to go, Pogačar lost control of his bike and fell to the ground. He was able to remount his chain and get back riding relatively quickly, but he found himself 22 seconds behind the peloton that included his GC rivals Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel.
Here was a chance for Vingegaard and Evenepoel to ride hard and take back precious seconds from Pogačar who before the stage had an advantage of over one minute on the pair.
But they didn’t. They chose to sit up and allowed Pogačar back into the group. It was, a relieved and thankful Pogačar said, “respect”.
Tour de France tradition dictates that in the event of an unfortunate crash, the peloton sits up and waits for the yellow jersey. But Pogačar wasn’t in yellow – Ben Healy of EF Education-EasyPost was.
Was Pogačar let off and have his rivals spurned a golden opportunity? “We waited for him, like we should do, in my opinion,” Vingegaard told reporters afterwards. “When it’s like that, it’s pure bad luck. It was not because he overcooked a corner or anything – he overlapped wheels so that [waiting] is the right to do it.”
Vingegaard’s Visma-lease a Bike’s teammate, Matteo Jorgenson, concurred. Only a few days ago Pogačar shoved Jorgenson in a feed zone. “It was a sporting decision,” the American said.
“After a lot of comments the other day, I guess accusations of unsportsmanlike stuff that I’ve never seen from him before, I think at least now he can be confident we’re trying to beat him in a sporting way.”
Healy also had a chance to benefit and to extend his lead in yellow going into the first Pyrenean stage on Thursday, but he too towed the same line. “It was respect among the riders,” the Irishman said.
“Whenever someone makes a silly mistake in the final when there’s not going to be a crazy difference from that point forward, I think anyone would appreciate the same [gesture of waiting].
The end result is that Healy, Pogačar, Vingegaard, Evenepoel and other riders in the GC game all finished with the same time in Toulouse, behind the winner Jonas Abrahamsen.
But had they not shown so much respect to a rider who many are still viewing as the theoretical leader of the race, the time gaps among the leading contenders could have been different.
Will they come to regret their collective decision?
