{"id":10246,"date":"2025-07-20T10:11:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T10:11:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/10246\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T10:11:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T10:11:14","slug":"tadej-pogacar-far-too-wise-to-walk-into-bernard-hinaults-trap-of-1986","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/10246\/","title":{"rendered":"Tadej Pogacar far too wise to walk into Bernard Hinault\u2019s trap of 1986"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tour de France has been in the Amaury family for more than 80 years, the race bequeathed by the French government to Emili\u00e9n Amaury for services rendered to the Resistance \u00adduring the German occupation of Paris. Emili\u00e9n\u2019s grandson, \u00adJean-Etienne Amaury, is now the \u00adpresident of the Amaury Sports \u00adOrganisation and with his mum, Marie-Odile, and his sister, Aurore, they own and manage the race.<\/p>\n

From the beginning the Amaurys asked journalists to run the race; \u00adJacques Goddet, F\u00e9lix L\u00e9vitan, Jean-Marie Leblanc and, now, Christian Prudhomme. Not that surprisingly, the newspapermen showed a flair for creating stories. One of Prudhomme\u2019s ideas for this year\u2019s Tour was to honour the memory of one of the most dramatic stages in the history of the Tour, the 13th leg of the 1986 race.<\/p>\n

One of the advantages for those of a certain age is that you may understand what is in someone\u2019s mind when they reference an event from decades ago. Prudhomme decided the 14th leg of this year\u2019s Tour would mirror the 13th stage of the 1986 race; kilometre for kilometre, climb for climb. Thirty-nine years ago they began in Pau, climbed the Col du Tourmalet, Col d\u2019Aspin, Col de Peyresourde and finished at the \u00adsummit of Superbagn\u00e8res.<\/p>\n

\"Cycling<\/p>\n

Hinault had won five Tour de France crowns but threw away a sixth tilt with his attacking ventures in \u201886<\/p>\n

JEAN-YVES RUSZNIEWSKI\/TEMPSPORT\/CORBIS\/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

And so on the third day in the Pyrenees this year, they followed the 1986 Pau to Superbagn\u00e8res route.<\/p>\n

Prudhomme isn\u2019t wrong. That stage in \u201986 was sensational; the memory has cruised through succeeding decades without losing a minute. Bernard Hinault, then a five-times Tour de France champion, had taken what seemed a vice-like grip the previous day. His lead was 5min 25sec from his La Vie Claire team-mate Greg LeMond, who started the Superbagn\u00e8res stage convinced he was racing for second place.<\/p>\n

Leaving Pau, the expectation was that Hinault would simply defend his substantial lead. That\u2019s how it seemed on the first climb, the Tourmalet. Hinault was comfortable. As the \u00adriders took newspaper from their soigneurs at the top to stuff under their jerseys, Hinault was the one rider who didn\u2019t. Instead, he accelerated.<\/p>\n

La Vie Claire sports director Maurice Le Guilloux was in the team car, thinking to himself, \u201cWhy is he attacking? He is more than five minutes ahead!\u201d At the bottom of the descent, Hinault led his rivals by 1:45. Le \u00adGuilloux tried to reason with him. \u201cI\u2019m not going back, I\u2019m not waiting,\u201d said the man affectionately known as Le Blaireau (The Badger).<\/p>\n

No one in the team understood. The plan for the day had been to defend the Yellow Jersey by keeping the pace high and covering the attacks of the other favourites. On the second climb, Col d\u2019Aspin, the Scot Robert Millar, the Colombian Lucho Herrera and the Swiss Urs Zimmermann committed to chasing Hinault, whose overall lead had now climbed to more than eight minutes.<\/p>\n

\"TDF<\/p>\n

Hinault, left, in the Polka Dot Jersey with LeMond in Yellow. The American won the first of his three Tours in 1986<\/p>\n

DOMINIQUE FAGET\/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

At that moment there wasn\u2019t one person who didn\u2019t see Hinault finishing the day with an eight or nine-minute lead. On the penultimate climb, the Peyresourde, the chasers began to make inroads into Hinault\u2019s lead. In the valley before Superbagn\u00e8res, the man in the Yellow Jersey began to wilt. Just ran out of energy. There were \u00addifferent names for it: \u201cthe bonk\u201d, \u201cthe hunger knock\u201d, \u201cla fringale\u201d. Hinault had it.<\/p>\n

Alexi Grewal, an American riding for the 7-Eleven team, remembers catching and distancing Hinault on the first slopes of Superbagn\u00e8res. He offered him the benefit of his wisdom. \u201cYou blew it, Bernie. You f***ed up,\u201d he said. Hinault didn\u2019t respond.<\/p>\n

Millar, who would become Philippa York in later life, recently recalled the feeling of distancing Hinault. \u201cHe was in a state. As soon as I saw him, I thought, \u2018Right, payback.\u2019 He had tried to humiliate us on the biggest stage and we liked Greg more than him. In Hinault\u2019s eyes we were all useless. It wasn\u2019t often you had the chance but when it came, I wanted to hurt him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinault lost 4:39 of his 5:25 lead and, in effect, lost the Tour that day, a race he had already won. He should have become the first rider in history to win a sixth Tour de France. His great friend in the team, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Bernard, then spoke to him.<\/p>\n

\"112th<\/p>\n

Misty conditions presented a major challenge to the peloton, with Pogacar and UAE riding conservatively<\/p>\n

TIM DE WAELE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did you do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I felt like it,\u201d said Hinault.<\/p>\n

Apart from the identical route, with the same four mountains, there was a curious parallel between this year\u2019s Superbagn\u00e8res stage and \u201986. On this occasion too, the man in the Yellow Jersey started the day with an almost unassailable 4:07 lead on his closest challenger, Jonas Vingegaard. And so often Tadej Pogacar\u2019s instinct urges him to attack. Mostly he says yes to his instinct. Through the course of his career, he has been a far more \u00adaggressive racer than Hinault.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the irony: over the route chosen to commemorate Hinault\u2019s folly, Pogacar and his UAE Team rode the most conservative race imaginable, concentrating on preserving the lead they had and making sure they made no mistakes. The stage was won by the Ineos-Grenadiers rider Thymen Arensman, who escaped from his breakaway companions 37 kilometres from the finish and rode strongly to finish more than a minute ahead of Pogacar and Vingegaard.<\/p>\n

Given that Arensman was already 40 minutes down on GC, Pogacar wasn\u2019t overly concerned about reeling him in, concentrating instead on countering Vingegaard and dominating his rival in the sprint for second place. Oscar Onley\u2019s remarkable Tour continued with another outstanding ride through the mountains. He finished sixth on the stage and with Remco Evenepoel abandoning the Tour, Onley moved up to fourth overall.<\/p>\n

\"Tour<\/p>\n

Arensman, on his first Tour, escaped from the breakaway 37km out to win the stage<\/p>\n

LOIC VENANCE\/EPA<\/p>\n

It was dispiriting to hear the stage winner\u2019s press conference. Arensman was asked two questions about the controversy surrounding Ineos\u2019s soigneur, David Rozman, and an alleged relationship with a doping doctor back in 2012. In Arensman\u2019s moment of victory he was telling journalists that they would have to direct their questions to the team\u2019s management. The journalists had been doing so for a week and not getting answers.<\/p>\n

\"112th<\/p>\n

Evenepoel was forced to abandon the Tour<\/p>\n

TIM DE WAELE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Pogacar was asked if he and his team were mindful of what happened to Hinault in \u201986 and whether that played into their strategy. \u201cI must admit I\u2019m not such a good student of the history of cycling,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe that is bad on me, but I don\u2019t pay too much attention to these details, but the way we rode today was different to how Hinault rode, with a mind to defend the Yellow Jersey, not to attack and be aggressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rider himself knew that he was at his limit through the final kilometre of his victory at Hautacam on Thursday, the same in the mountain time-trial to Peyragudes on Friday. Over the route where Hinault perished in 1986, Pogacar decided to play safe and focus on recovery. <\/p>\n

They climb Mont Ventoux on Tuesday and with \u00adPogacar in the Yellow Jersey, one wouldn\u2019t need to be Einstein to \u00adimagine that he has something planned for that iconic climb.<\/p>\n

Stage 14 Results1 T Arensman (Ineos, Ned); 2 T Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Slovenia) +1min 8sec; 3 J Vingegaard (Team Visma-Lease a Bike, Den) +1.12; 4 F Gall (Decathlon AGR2 La Mondiale, Aut) +1.19; 5 F Lipowitz (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, Ger) +1.25 6 O Onley (Team Pincic PostNL, GB) +2.09; 7 B Healy (EF Education-EasyPost, Ire) +2.46; 8 P Roglic (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, Slovenia) +2.46; 9 T Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility, Nor) +2.59; 10 K Vauquelin (ARKEA-B&B Hotels, Fra) +3.08GC Standings1 T Pogacar 50:40:28; 2 J Vingegaard +4mins 13secs; 3 F Lipowitz +7.53; 4 O Onley +9.18; 5 K Vauquelin +10.21; 6 P Roglic +10.34; 7 F Gall +12.00; 8 T Johannessen +12.33; 9 B Healy +18.41; 10 C Rodriguez (Ineos, Spa) +22.57<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tour de France has been in the Amaury family for more than 80 years, the race bequeathed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-10246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}