The rain-soaked hors categorie climb to La Plagne set the perfect stage. With the top-four riders in the general classification together with 19 kilometres to go on the final mountain day of the 2025 Tour de France, the key protagonists were all there. The script was waiting to be written and we should have been treated to a blockbuster. But this is not a Netflix special, this is real-world bike racing. Today, reality was a quiet, finely-poised, stalemate.
Despite all of Visma-Lease a Bike’s vows to give everything to try and win yellow at this Tour until the very end, the attack on the climb did not come from them. Nor did it come from Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s Florian Lipowitz who sits in third place in the general classification, or Oscar Onley for Picnic-PostNL who is just below him. It was the Ineos Grenadiers and Thymen Arensman who capitalised on the mind games in the end – the Dutch rider took his opportunity to ride away from the GC group and solo to his second stage win of the race. Behind him, for a long time, they just looked at each other.
As Arensman disappeared up and into the rain clouds that shrouded the Alps, the gap between him and the Tadej Pogačar-led group behind him teetered dangerously. It was never so big that the stage win was out of the question for the others, or so that the Ineos rider could be comfortable. Still, however, they did not move behind. The yellow jersey wearer set the pace and those behind him sat obediently on his wheel in the very order they currently stack up on the general classification. It was not until Onley began to drop that Lipowitz came to the front to increase his buffer in third place, but that was not enough to bring Arensman back. Vingegaard did not take to the front of the race until the final hundred metres – he finished second in the end. No stage victory, and no closer to Pogačar on the general classification.
Was it a lack of ambition from the Danish rider that stopped him and his team from trying something earlier in the stage? Or did he play the tactical game to perfection? Visma-Lease a Bike sport’s director, Grischa Niermann, told Rouleur atop La Plagne that the shortened route of stage 19 impacted his team’s choices (the route was cut to 95 kilometres from 129.9km due to an animal cull on the Col de Saises area.)
Visma weren't as aggressive as they had been on previous stages (Image: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
“He wanted to win today, that didn’t happen. This morning when we discussed what to do with the changed parcours of this stage, we were pretty sure this was not the day to win four and a half minutes [on the general classification],” the Dutchman stated.
“If he attacked earlier, Pogačar would have been in the wheel and countered him in the end, I didn’t see the sprint yet but I don’t think it was a big mistake [for Vingegaard not to attack] I just think they sprinted a little bit too late. If it had been the original route, we would have tried to get some riders ahead and try something on the climb before but like this it was not really possible.”
As for the yellow jersey wearer himself, Pogačar rode almost the entirety of the final climb on the front of the GC group. The onus was not on him to attack – though he did once midway up the climb – because he already has 21 stage victories to his name. He already leads this race by almost five minutes. He too commented in his post-race press conference that he expected more commitment from his rivals on the final climb.
“I was hoping that I could set the pace I could feel comfortable with, and then if somebody attacked I could still accelerate, that's why I had to set such a pace. No one wanted to pull, I attacked and then I was thinking maybe me and Jonas could go to the top. I tried to set a rhythm, and Arensman was stronger,” the world champion commented.
He also pointed out the difficulty of this Tour de France so far, stating that as a potential reason for the ceasefire atop La Plagne: “I'm obviously tired. It's not been an easy Tour. People have been attacking me from left and right, from day one until the end. The priority is the yellow jersey, so I was counting down the kilometres because I was going with my pace and hoping that nobody would attack from behind, and that's it. Sometimes you just count down the kilometres.”
So the kilometres tick down to Paris and Pogačar is counting them, as is the rest of the peloton. The racing, it seems, is coming to a slow, quiet end. The mountains are behind us and the Tour de France circus will roll north through France towards the City of Lights. The final two mountain stages provided worthy winners, though perhaps not the explosive GC action we expected on the show-stopping climbs ASO gave the peloton to race on. It’s been a long three weeks for both the man who wears yellow – but also for the riders who have been set the impossible task of trying to beat him. At some point, batteries run out.
