Pogacar, the tight-rope walker who strolls on thin air
They had promised us a chiaroscuro July, a blade-to-blade duel between Vingegaard and Pogacar. The Dauphiné—France’s dress-rehearsal where every man adjusts the tassel of his cap—turned into a solo delivered in perfect Slovene: Tadej Pogacar spoke, and the mountain fell silent.
You needed only glance, Saturday at Valmeinier 1 800, at those two faces: the Dane chalk-white with strain; the Slovene serenely blowing soap-bubbles at gravity. The formal gap—one minute, a speck of dust—says nothing of the real abyss. Miffed by a middling time-trial, Pogacar slammed his fist down as one wipes an inkwell clean, summoning the memory of Combloux, when he condemned his rival to the realm of shadows in a handful of kilometres.
For six seasons the boy from Komenda has been crossing out adversaries the way a schoolboy erases conjugations. Valverde and Roglic were first, then Van Aert, Vingegaard and Van der Poel. In June 2025 only one windmill still whirrs—MVDP on two cobbled monuments; everywhere else the Slovene reigns, master-cut.
Milan–San Remo? The last bastion still standing, already trembling at its foundations. And Roubaix? Hell has discovered its angel; we now know the Arenberg Trench will one day bow to his smile. His lone recent blemish—an Amstel Gold Race pinched by Mattias Skjelmose—looks like the wine stain on a banquet cloth: we point it out only to measure the feast around it.
A week of hammer-blows between Auvergne and the Alps
This Dauphiné felt more brutal than ever. At Combloux, Pogacar joked about having « dépêché pour voir l’arrivée d’Urska »; at Valmeinier he relished slowing down « pour être plus lucide face aux micros ». Old-pro humour, a newborn arrogance: the champion strokes the crowd with one hand and flays the field with the other. Did he need to strike Jonas Vingegaard again? Surely not. But why abstain when you meander up the pass, shirt flapping like bunting, and can excuse the blow by a refusal to be trapped?
The slow lesson of numbers
History reminds us Dauphiné glory does not always wed the Tour. Froome (2015, 2016), Thomas (2018) and Vingegaard (2023) managed the double; the list is thin but offers the Dane a thread of hope. Three weeks separate humiliation from revenge—little and much at once when you have swallowed a mountain-sized slap. Can we believe in miracles? Perhaps. Yet history, leaning on the balcony, winks and whispers: there is no miracle save for those who cling to it fiercely.
Certainties, nothing but certainties
Pogacar does not abolish doubts; he renders them useless. Ask the puncheurs: they shrug. Question the climbers: they lower their gaze. On the honour roll, the Cannibal’s name still hovers high; but beneath that shadow the Slovene, at twenty-six, scripts the modern draft of legend. One thinks of La Fontaine:
“The mountain laboured, and—out sprang a giant.”
Waiting for July, Jonas Vingegaard clings to the flicker of a counter-example. We, the spectators, tilt back our heads: funambulist Pogacar prances along his wire, more super-human than ever—and the void beneath his feet looks suddenly, dizzyingly deep.
