Slovenia's cycling superstar reclaims yellow jersey

Tour de France defending champion Tadej Pogačar is back in yellow after winning stage 12, the first true mountain showdown of this year's race, in a dominant fashion, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

The Slovenian put additional time into his main general classification rival, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, who now has a deficit of three minutes and 31 seconds to Pogačar.

This marks Pogačar's 20th Tour de France stage win, and the 26-year-old achieved it at around about the same age as Mark Cavendish, a British retired cyclist who holds the record of 35 stage wins at the most prestigious multi-week stage race.

The Slovenian UAE Team Emirates-XRG captain proved yet again that the mountains are his terrain, but then again the versatile rider can say that for almost any terrain.

In 2022, Pogačar all but relinquished his hopes of winning a third successive Tour on the stage featuring this particular summit finish on Hautacam, a ski resort in the Pyrenees, but this year he faced what he called today "a super nice climb" and exorcised the demons of that day.

He launched an attack some 12 kilometres to go, at the bottom of the last climb of the 180.6-kilometre ride, after a lead-out by his teammate Jhonatan Narváez and basically did not look back. The gap between Pogačar and Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) kept growing and in the end he put an additional two minutes and ten seconds into his rival, who beat him on this exact course three years ago.

His cadence stayed impressive and his speed approached 20 km/h even as the gradient hit 12%. He crossed the finish line visibly exhausted but still not letting up and celebrated with a finger pointed at the sky.

"I'm supper happy to take time and win on this climb," Pogačar told the organisers while cooling down on a bike trainer.

Commenting on his high-speed crash the day before, he said:

"You don't know how the body reacts after the crash, but it was not too bad, it was not a bad crash. I feel my hip only if I'm doing acrobatics, but here I'm just riding a bike."

"We did a superb job, the team rode really well ... We had this stage in mind for a long time, we did it," he said, dedicating the stage win to 19-year-old Italian rider Samuele Privitera, who recently died following a heavy crash during the Giro della Valle d'Aosta, and his family.

"I was thinking about him in the last kilometre and about how tough this sport can be and how much pain it can cause."

Pogačar has now also reclaimed the polka-dot jersey of the best climber.

Another Slovenian general classification contender in the Tour, Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) finished ninth to climb to the seventh spot in the overall standings. However, he is seven minutes and 30 seconds behind Pogačar.