A concession ASO announced to liven up the green-jersey fight has quietly vanished from the roadbook, while another takes its place.
Fake sprinting his own teammates is as close to a bunch sprint as Pogačar generally wants to get.
Cor Vos
When Jonathan Milan won the green points jersey at last year’s Tour de France, the rider who pushed him closest wasn’t another sprinter. It was Tadej Pogačar, who spent his month winning the whole bike race, its climber’s jersey, and, mostly by accident, slowly working his way up the points classification without ever contesting a bunch sprint.
The result seems to have kept ASO up at night, because since last summer it implemented two sizeable changes, and then recanted on one. The intention of both is to make it harder for a rider like Pogacar to wear green into Paris.
Balancing the green jersey
Last October, around the Tour’s annual route announcement in Paris, ASO announced what sounded like a peace offering to sprinters. It had just presented a route that isn’t exactly friendly to them. It has seven “flat” stages, but at least two, possibly three, of those are likely to end without a bunch sprint. Sprinters have minimal chance of wearing yellow, too, because of the early TTT and difficult stage 2.
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The offering was that the Tour was going to double the number of intermediate sprint points on the race’s flat stages, from one to two. This would make more points available to the pure sprinters – generally, the middle of a sprint stage is about as flat as the start of one, and isn’t really Pogačar territory. Top sprinters like Jasper Philipsen or Tim Merlier would be far more likely to wear green to Paris.
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