Tadej Pogačar was better than ever on the Tour de France Stage 14 with UAE Team Emirates pacing hard all day for their leader. Pogačar dropped Jonas Vingegaard on the steep Pla d’Adet gradients, winning his 13th stage in the Tour and extending his already large lead in the general classification.
It was the first big mountain day in the 2024 Tour de France with Col du Tourmalet from the 2019 Tour side where Thibaut Pinot won, Hourquette d’Ancizan and Pla d’Adet. The final climb was way harder than the 10.58 km of 7.99% gradient indicates, as the final three kilometres were shallower and included a flatter section, while the first part was loaded with steep sections.
UAE Team Emirates were pacing hard for another possible stage win, despite Pogačar losing to Vingegaard on the previous Puy Mary mountain stage in an uphill sprint. Nils Politt did impressive work as he pulled practically all alone on the Tourmalet and lost only 3:40 min to Thibaut Pinot’s winning time in the 2019 Tour. The riders in the peloton pushed 5.60 ᵉW/Kg for 54:50 min. Thanks to Marc Soler, the tempo was also high on the irregular Hourquette d’Ancizan that followed, spelling the end of the breakaway and Ben Healy’s hopes. Derek Gee before the final climb had spent already 3,689 kilojoules for 3:34h at 15,08 kj/kg/h. A very intense stage as the long climbs were ridden fast and the vast majority of the elevation gain was in the last 75km of the stage.
Pavel Sivakov and Joao Almeida pulled the first part of Pla d’Adet, setting a high tempo before Adam Yates’ surprise attack. Pogačar told the Brit to attack and he launched with 7.1 km to go. Yates was closing down on the last breakaway survivor Ben Healy, who was strong but unlucky for him, UAE Team Emirates had different plans.
Matteo Jorgenson was pulling in the GC group for Jonas Vingegaard to hold a high tempo, while Yates extended his lead to 30 seconds. Everyone knew Pogačar would attack and he accelerated with 4.5 km to go, dropping everyone and bridging to Yates in less than 40 seconds. Yates did not pace Pogačar for long, as the Slovenian was looking very strong and could ride faster himself. Vingegaard dropped Evenepoel with 3.7 km to go, but he was losing time to the Slovenian, particularly in the last three kilometers as the gradients became shallower.
It is possibly the UAE superstar’s greatest climbing performance of all time and maybe the best in the 21st century, considering the moderate altitude and stage difficulty. Pogačar did 6.85 ᵉW/Kg for 27:50 min, which is above the All-Time Top 30 trend-line. For sea level normalised, it is 7.16 ᵉW/Kg. Pogačar beat Lance Armstrong’s 2001 and Tony Rominger, Miguel Indurain and Zenon Jaskula’s 1993 times by around two minutes. When comparing to other top performances this century, Pogačar on Pla d’Adet was slightly more impressive than Contador’s 2009 Verbier and Basso’s 2006 Monte Bondone efforts. The biggest knock on Basso’s Monte Bondone performance was that it was after a flat stage, whilst Contador’s Verbier performance when adjusted for altitude and the higher intensity of the Tour de France 2024, falls slightly below this Pla d’Adet.
Jonas Vingegaard despite showing one of the best performances lost 39 seconds with 6.67 ᵉW/Kg for 28:29 min. Everyone in the GC group performed at a high level. Even Simon Yates who has lost 24 minutes in the previous stages. He pushed 6.36 ᵉW/Kg for 29:23 min, which is 6.65 ᵉW/Kg normalized power for sea level and one of his better climbing performances. Yates finished 13th, losing 93 seconds to Pogačar.
With a huge 197-kilometre mountain stage coming on Stage 15 with more climbing and the Plateau de Beille finish, it will be interesting to see the tactics and climbing performances on after a historic stage on Pla d’Adet.
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what is the weight of pgacar
Supposedly around 63-64kg for the Tour
Hi, thank you for watts estimation, that was one hell of a boom and he is gone performance by Tadej. Small request/suggestion regarding your graphs. Could you please include legend into all of your graphs that explains what different color trend line means. I personally am always confused by what which means and I would guess that I am not alone.
Agree, that would be super helpful to label the trend lines.
Yes, good suggestion. Will make it soon
Added and renamed them. Thanks for suggestion
So are we to believe all the rides are clean ? They’re beating Armstrongs output and he’s an admitted cheater… food for thought
Hang on, did Armstrong admit to cheating? Anyway, I’m unsure if they are clean or not, but the show is incredible 😉
I thought he did in his interview with Oprah?
They always cheated since the 1st tour and still today. Just get rid of drug testing and let them race . Gone are the big rivalries, the has gotten so boring
We’re literally witnessing the greatest rivalry ever!
A quick note on methodology, with the benefit of showing math: there’s a long-held conversion from VAM to w/kg that you can find on Training Peaks and forums.
This methodology says that for Pogi’s 1822 VAM, his w/kg is 6.51.
We can sense check this against Derek Gee’s posted ride on Strava with power in two ways. First, our VAM to w/kg calculator predicts a w/kg of 6.3 based on his VAM of the Strava segment. We know he did the segment actually at 6.0-6.35 w/kg depending on if you think he’s 68-71 kg.
This says that our VAM method likely overestimates or is roughly accurate, although you could argue Gee may have benefited from minor draft advantage on a 8% climb at 13mph.
We can also take Gee’s known w/kg and simply multiply by Pogi’s 4.9% quicker ascent. This gives us 6.3-6.5 w/kg for Pogi.
It seems like these ranges are more accurate than 6.85, imo.
I like this approach, and have followed it myself. The only problem is that Gee’s weight is not accurately reported. Here is something I have done which I guess yields good results.
1) Take the 5 best riders on a given strava segment whose watts are disclosed.
2) Calculate the average VAM to watts/kg ratio. This figure should be roughly consistent across every rider on a given climb.
3) Update the riders weights so that the aforementioned ratio is the same for all of them.
After checking the Lioran stage, I was able to get a more precise idea of the weight of Gee and Buitrago, for example.
Injecting their new weights in today’s stage calculations allows me to see that Pogacar’s performance was, if calculated according to your method about 6.5W/kg.
The discrepancy between the article results and my figure can be explained in a few ways:
1) I guess the weight of riders as reported online is not only inaccurate but also systematically overstated. To explain the 0.3W/kg, there should be a ~3kg average bias in riders weight from Pro Cycling Stats. It is not absurd, given the fact that riders are usually sharper during the TDF than at any point during the year.
2) The assumption that the VAM to W/kg ratio is a constant on a given climb doesn’t account for the fact that aerodynamic drag is not linear with speed. So the weight calculations are a bit off, because of this second-order effect.
All in all, I guess a merger of your approach and that Karlis would be even better than each one taken separately. For example, if have a even a gross estimate of how much power is expended fighting against gravity (and other linearly scaling stuff) vs fighting against aerodynamic drag for any rider on a climb, we have enough information to compute a very precise estimate of the non linearity of our VAM to W/kg ratio, which in turns allows for a very precise estimate of a rider’s weight, which in turns gets us precise W/Kg figures. Maybe not absolute W/kg figures but relative.
Here is a link to my calculations on a Google Sheet. If links are allowed.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PwK4o6MtM3EgHceWW9vmJDr00i8x9jnxaSdf-zYEkpc/edit?gid=181133154#gid=181133154
Doesn’t the fact that all of the riders outputs are higher than normal suggest that there is a calculation error here? Its not likely that every single rider suddenly had a day better than they’ve ever had before. If you were to assume that other riders did a normal for them performance and use that to normalise Pog’s output what would his result be then?
How do you account for wind? I find that when riding in the mountains especially, the wind can be variable and unpredictable. Wind as given by nearby weather sites are often wrong for the road. (Just look at the variability in the wind speed and direction as reported on the Wundermap weather sites.)