Imperious Pogacar wins time trial to extend lead

Tadej Pogacar won the Tour de France for the fourth time on Friday, reaffirming his dominance of the event.

The reigning champion won the stage 13 mountain time trail with a victory on Thursday, regaining the overall lead.

In exactly 23 minutes, the Slovenian, 26, completed the 10.9 km route in Loudenvielle to the Pyrenees airfield.

His lead now runs four minutes, seven seconds, faster than Jonas Vingegaard, his main rival, and by 36 seconds.

Remco Evenepoel, a world and Olympic time-trial champion, won the other time trial this year on the Tour after starting third overall.

The Belgian was already struggling when Vingegaard passed him on the final steep climb while he was distracted by a minor mechanical problem.

Evenepoel continued to lead the GC standings despite moving 2 minutes, 39 seconds slower than Pogacar, who is now well ahead of the defending champion by well over seven minutes.

Pogacar is now 21 overall as he regained the Tour title from two-time champion Vingegaard last year by winning six of his six stages.

There are still eight stages left to go on this year’s edition, which puts him sixth overall behind Sir Mark Cavendish, who set the record for 35 last year.

Pogacar remarked, “I’m really happy. “It was a significant question mark for me when I first started this time trial in December.” Everything I desired was perfect.

I really wanted to go from beginning to end and made an effort to smash the pedals as much as possible.

“I almost blew up in the end, but I didn’t realize I was going to win until I saw the timer at the top.”

Time-trial champion Australian Luke Plapp set a new benchmark and dominated the final lap of the day as competitors struggled to recover.

The average gradient for the 8 km to the line was 7.8%, but the final 300 meters were 16%.

After being sent off at two-minute intervals to Pogacar on Thursday, Vingegaard managed to catch Evenepoel 50 meters off the line after sending him 2 minutes, 10 seconds.

It’s nice to come back like this because today was probably one of my worst performances, but yesterday was probably one of my best, the Dane said.

A select few riders chose to use adapted time-trial bikes, including Vingegaard and Evenepoel, but Pogacar, who chose a road bike, performed the fastest during each of the two time-checks before advancing to the final section.