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The prospects of the first Giro d’Italia-Tour de France double since 1998 took a leap forward this month.
That’s the assessment of Sean Kelly, former world No. 1 and currently one of the best analyst of the sport.
Prior to April 4 Tadej Pogačar was set to square up against strong rivals Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič at the Tour.
The latter three may well still be there, but crashing hard in the Itzulia Basque Country race with 12 weeks to the Tour will do their preparation no favors.
“It’s very possible,” Eurosport expert Kelly told Velo when asked if the fractures will compromise Vingegaard’s Tour chances.
“Some individuals don’t need a lot of racing and they don’t need a lot of bike work before a big three weeker. Some guys need more. So each individual can differ a lot. But it is going to be a worry [for him], and it can be a really difficult situation when you count that number of weeks until the Tour.”
Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Roglič went down in the same high-speed crash with about 33km remaining of last Thursday’s fourth stage of the Itzulia event.
Double Tour winner Vingegaard suffered a broken collarbone and several broken ribs, as well as pulmonary contusion and a punctured lung.
Evenepoel fractured his right collarbone and shoulder blade, while Roglič also left the race with injuries but escaped any fractures.
His recovery will likely be the most straightforward of the three, although he has scrapped the Ardennes Classics from his program. As for Vingegaard and Evenepoel, they look set for several weeks or more of big disruption.
“The collarbone is normally not so complicated,” Kelly said of Evenepoel. “If it is displaced you can have an operation and be back on the bike very quickly. But the shoulder blade can be slower one to heal, and to be able to get back on the bike and do the work you need to do.”
Update on Jonas Vingegaard:
Jonas had a successful operation on his collarbone.
He will now spend the next few weeks recovering. It is not yet clear how long this will take.
He is doing well and expresses his gratitude to everyone for their kind words over the past few…
— Team Visma | Lease a Bike (@vismaleaseabike) April 9, 2024
Time will tell how soon they are back training and, after that, back in the bunch. But does Kelly feel that this complication has boosted Pogačar’s chances of taking another Tour and — all going to plan in Italy — completing the Giro-Tour double?
“Well, it’s looking much more so than it was,” Kelly said. “The possibility now is much, much greater for winning Giro and Tour.
“I think for the other guys, there is a worry that it is going to hinder their preparation and their race program before the Tour. How much is that going to affect them? We will see in the next few weeks, when you start hearing ‘he is back on the bike and he is doing X number of hours.’
“As that information filters through we will have a better idea of how they are looking for the Tour. That’s something the riders and the specialists working with them don’t know the answer to yet. They will just take it week by week to see how things are developing.
“But, for Pogačar, I think his chances have improved.”
Assessing the effects of a big season disruption
If you are looking for parallels, there is a clear example of how a big crash in the leadup to the Tour can affect a rider in that race.
The rider in question? Pogačar himself.
On April 23 last year he hit the deck in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. The crash ended his race and he was diagnosed with fractured scaphoid and lunate bones in his left wrist.
He was unable to train on the road until mid-June and ultimately returned to competition two months after the accident. While he was distanced by big Tour rival Vingegaard on stage 5, he bounced back the following day by dropping the Dane and winning the stage.
He also took time out of him again on stage 9, narrowing the gap between them to just 17 seconds.
But while momentum appeared fully on his side at that point, Kelly advised caution about any presumption he would win. He was ultimately proven absolutely correct in his assessment.
“Last year he had that injury in Liège,” he told Velo in a recent call. “I did say at the start of the Tour that was going to affect him as we got later into the race, when you get into the third week.
“The team were talking him up, saying, ‘no, he’s turning out the watts that he normally was, he’s in the shape to win the Tour.’
“Of course, they’re going to say that so as not to dent his morale at all. But I think they knew that there could be a problem as you went into this final week of the race. And as I was forecasting, he started to weaken.
“He started to show that in the third week of the Tour.”
While this year’s Itzulia Basque Country crash occurred two and a half weeks earlier in the season than Pogačar’s crash last year, the parallels are there. Vingegaard and Evenepoel will have disrupted build-ups which could see them also have inconsistent form in the race.
Time will tell if they have more success negotiating that issue than the Slovenian did last year. But, all going to plan in the weeks and months ahead, Kelly regards him as being in a very strong position.
“It is impressive with these guys, the way they can just appear. They come to their first race and they can ride away from the rest and do 40 kilometers or 45 kilometers on their own.
“It just shows the talent, just a huge amount of talent, and that’s what Pogačar has got.”
Talent aside, he’s also learning more about how to get the best out of himself.
He’s done less racing this year yet has racked up six wins in just nine days of competition.
These include a mammoth 81km solo break to take Strade Bianche, plus a four-stage victory streak in the Volta a Catalunya and the biggest GC-winning margin in 41 years.
The new approach of “less is more” contrasts completely with his approach in 2022, the first year he lost out to Vingegaard in the Tour.
As Kelly points out, Pogačar went too deep too early in the season and ended up short of reserves in the Tour.
“There were just too many races on his program,” he explained. “And also he was racing so aggressively – I think all of that caught him out in the Tour. At the same time Vingegaard got into excellent shape, of course.
“Then last year, they cut back the number of races, but then his crash in Liège really upset it once again for him.”
So, third time lucky, perhaps?
“This year you can see he is not doing as much races at the early part of the season,” Kelly said. “He is being much more selective and I think they have learned from that.”
That’s food for thought for his rivals while they recover from this month’s big crash.