Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard both did the best and second-best climbing performance of all time on the Plateau de Beille climb, making this the greatest climbing stage of all time.
It was one of the hardest mountain stages in the modern era with 198.5 kilometres and 5,071 metres of elevation gain. It was the perfect day for Jonas Vingegaard as it was hard and hot, but it would be difficult to beat Tadej Pogačar after the Slovenian did the greatest performance of the 21st century yesterday. Visma Lease a Bike with Christophe Laporte, Bart Lemmen, Tiesj Benoot, Wout van Aert, Jan Tratnik, Matteo Jorgenson and Wilco Kelderman tried to make this stage as hard as possible on the steep climbs, with high watts needed to stay in the peloton as follows:
- Peyresourde: 6 ᵉW/Kg for 20 min
Mente: 5.6 ᵉW/Kg for 30 min
Portet Aspet: 6 ᵉW/Kg for 15 min
Agnes: 5.9 ᵉW/Kg for 30 min
Santiago Buitrago spent 4,019 kilojoules for 4:38h at 14.34 kj/kg/h before the final climb. Matteo Jorgenson was pulling from the start of Plateau de Beille and slowly reduced the group to eight riders. Joao Almeida, Giulio Ciccone and Carlos Rodriguez were distanced by the American climber who has been climbing better as the Tour de France progressed. It was a headwind up the climb, which slowed down the GC favourites. With 10.4 km to go Jonas Vingegaard attacked and only Tadej Pogačar followed him. Pogačar was on Vingegaard’s wheel until 5.4 to go when he attacked and distanced the Dane.
Pogačar set a new climbing record on Plateau de Beille, beating Marco Pantani’s 1998 effort by 3 minutes and 44 seconds. Pogačar did not have the perfect conditions as it was a headwind, but his performance was the greatest in cycling history. Pantani had a 6.96-kilogram aluminium bike but had higher CdA and rolling resistance than Pogačar, but on an 8% climb aerodynamics, whilst important, are not the most crucial thing. It is watts that are the most important like Pogačar said earlier this Tour, and the UAE superstar had perhaps the strongest legs any cyclist has ever had.
Pogačar did 6.98 ᵉW/Kg for 39:50 min, which is by far the greatest climbing performance ever, taking into account conditions and the stage difficulty. Sea normalised power for this historic effort is 7.27 ᵉW/Kg. Pogačar’s adjusted altitude score was 696, which means this performance was equivalent to pushing 6.96 ᵉW/Kg for 60 minutes at sea level. Jonas Vingegaard, despite losing 68 seconds did the second-greatest climbing performance of all time. The Dane did 6.85 ᵉW/Kg for 40:58 min. His altitude score was the second highest in history with 685. Until today, Marco Pantani’s Alpe d’Huez in 1997 was the best in history. Remco Evenepoel lost 2:51 min on a climb to Pogačar, but his performance still was the 23rd best of all-time as he pushed 6.53 ᵉW/Kg for 42:41, which for sea level normalised is 6.81 ᵉW/Kg. Evenepoel’s performance still is the third best in the 21st century. Pogačar’s Stage 14 effort on Pla d’Adet is the fourth best.
When looking at pure ᵉW/Kg numbers, Tadej Pogačar’s effort still stands out as the most impressive in a road race. Even Marco Pantani’s Flumserberg effort in the 1995 Tour de Suisse is not looking as impressive anymore as it was after an easier day and was not high in the mountains. That being said, 7.34 ᵉW/Kg for 23:30 min is impressive for any rider. Previously Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Pogačar had one effort above or really close to the pink All Time Top 40 trendline. Evenepoel in the 2023 Volta a Catalunya in perfect conditions with fresh legs did 6.90 ᵉW/Kg for 24 minutes and Jonas Vingegaard at low altitude in the 2023 Basque Country distanced everyone with 7.44 ᵉW/Kg for 11:21 ᵉW/Kg. Pogačar now is the only rider in history to do such an effort on two back-to-back days.
Pogačar improved his gap in the GC and now is 3 minutes and 9 seconds ahead of Vingegaard, making him very hard to beat in the third week. Remco Evenepoel is more than 5 minutes ahead of Joao Almeida and has a good chance to finish on the podium in his debut Tour, where he has performed better than ever.
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Speaking as a Slovenian and a Pogi fan, is he is actually clean, that’s just unbelievable, completely crazy. It he’s not, that’s still f-ing impressive. Either way, it’s insane, huge congrats to him. Same goes to Jonas, Remco and everyone else, extremely high level
There’s just no way he’s clean. Or any of these performances. Come on.
How much did it matter that it was a headwind for Tadej to attack Jonas? Jonas was at the front for over 5km with Tadej on his wheel the whole time. Tadej attacked Jonas after the steep part. I think from where Tadej went it was <7% to the finish? It seems that, of course Tadej was stronger, but also he was paced and protected from the wind by Jonas, even if the aero gain is small, there's still some no? If, hypothetically, the situation was reversed and Tadej had to pace over 5km with Jonas on the wheel, would that have resulted in a different outcome?
How does it change the results if we account for pogis and vinges specific weight instead of normalizing weights at 60 kg ? (vingegaard is a bit lighter than pogi).
Hi – I find the analysis interesting, thanks. Just have a general curiousity on some of the number crunching. Can I ask why you typically express energy expenditure in terms of kJ? Surely it would be simpler/more intuitive to discuss it in terms Wh, given that typical rider power values are familiar to many fans? I.e. it requires one (significant) less mental arithmetic step to relate energy use to average instantaneous effort (W). This unit of measurement has found common use in energy billing for this reason (i.e. gas and electricity is generally billed per kWh not per MJ). The point extends further to quoting figures in kJ/kg/h. Why make comparisons less relatable when you could use W/kg?
Mainly a point around the accessibility of your analysis but also interested to hear if I have misunderstood something and there is specific rationale behind the choice of units.
Thanks
I totally agree, it’s much clearer and more intuitive. Ride at 200W for 1h, it’s 200Wh. Do it for 5h, it’s 1000Wh. Simple. That way everyone immediately gets a grasp on how much 1116Wh is in the following statement: “Santiago Buitrago spent 4,019 kilojoules for 4:38h at 14.34 kj/kg/h” is changed to “Santiago Buitrago spent 1116Wh for 4:38h at 3.88Wh/kg/h” (which by the way is basically the same as saying that he was riding at 3.88W/kg avg).
Maybe dumb question: Are all Armstrong-Performances conciously excluded? Because if we include Pantani and Ullrich for reference, then Armstrongs performances are equally interesting…
Armstrong wasn’t even close to this level, nor to the level of peak Pantani. But yes, In the database there’s plenty of Armstrong performances.
Armstrong was a TT specialist, he won in the era when a strong TT and decent climbing won the tour, there was well over 100km of TT in the Tour Lance rode in
Thansk for the analysis, historic stage. However, when I read that Remco did better than anyone else ever in the 21st century, alarms go off in my head. Are you sure there aren’t any wrong inputs here? Change in wind direction? Wind impact overblown in the forest part of the road? I just find it hard to believe that after yesterday, and after the day’s effort, Evenepoel performed better than Pogi yesterday.
Hey! Same doubts for me. So I crushed Strava numbers to check. Indeed, Pogacar’s performance today was much greater than yesterday. A very, very conservative estimate of his power using a different approach gives me 6.83W/kg. The real performance is most likely 0.2W/kg above (systematic bias of my calculations). So it is very coherent with the estimations here.
Also, Vingegaard said at the end of the stage that today’s performance was one of the best of his life. This statement is coherent to lanterne rouge’s analysis too.
At last, this climb was ridden very steadily by each rider at his own pace, which could explain why everybody performed vnicely.
But what a performance anyway!
Thanks for the confirmation. I guess outliers always happen, like Ulissi Prati di Tivo, which looked like one of the best climbing performances of the year before the Tour. Compared to that point, its not crazy that these riders can do 0.5 W/KG more for rougly the same time.
But this questions the whole usefulness of the methodology and data itself. Unless we assume everyone had the best sleep is his life last night, or that they held back on the Pla, avg eW/KG for a climb is not the right way to measure climbing performance, and such, not really useful to predict future performances.. Maybe for a mountain time trial, where everyone paces perfectly. Or maybe we need to separate the build up phase (paced sub-optimum), the max effort phase (paced over-optimum) and the time trial phase (paced around optimum).
The 3 min 44 sec inside Pantani’s 1998 record shouldn’t be taken all that seriously. Pogacar et al were full on right from the bottom, but Pantani didn’t attack until he was around 9 min into the climb, with the first 5 minutes or so taken at a steady pace whilst Ullrich was coming back from a puncture.
https://youtu.be/YqhnmjCdr54?si=cOiamn00258CbDXR&t=526
Yeah, because watching that YouTube video, they were clearly just taking it easy from the bottom. Oh no, wait…
Puede ser, pero lo que si es claro es que los que mencionas habían gastado bastante menos kilojulios antes de la ascension y normalmente la etapa anterior abría sido de menos desgaste que la que se tuvo éste sábado.
And the great thing is none of them are doped now!!
Hurrah for clean cycling!
It’s the bikes, they’re juiced. Almost 4 minutes faster than known dopers…..in a headwind! Come on man!
I wonder if Kuss would’ve gotten Vingegaard to the 5km mark if he were here. Today could’ve gone much differently if Vingegaard didn’t have to pull Pogi for so long.
Nonetheless my favorite rider is now in prime position to win the Tour.
On today’s stage I don’t think it would have made a difference, Pogi was just on a completely different level. In the end Jonas and Pogi both did around 5km in the wind. But hypothetically if Kuss got them to 5km, all that is doing is delaying how long Pogi needs to hold Jonas’ wheel to the finish. I don’t think Kuss would have paced it any harder than Jonas did once Mateo pulled off. And we saw that Jonas couldn’t drop Pogi in the 5km before Pogi attacked so I don’t think the result would have been any different other than Jonas would have saved himself some time loss.
For what it’s worth, Pogi did say he was starting to lose Jonas’ wheel before Jonas started to slow down and he attacked, so if you take that at face value Kuss absolutely could’ve made a difference. However, that statement probably doesn’t have much validity to it given how strong Pogi was once he dropped Jonas.
Roglic lo port erasure
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The past two days have confirmed dominance of Tadej but with such dominance the doubts resurface. Everyone in the community seems to be worried that the juice is back. But these riders are tested every day. The lab protocols are so precise that the possibility of a juiced rider going undetected seems improbable to me. So how do those who believe they’re juiced think they’re doing it? What are they taking that goes undetected and how?
Why don’t you call it out? You’re writing as much in between the lines, just say it. Or are you scared of the broadcast rights to the channel being taken away? That’s how you become part of the problem mate.
It seems like the performances have gotten dramatically better each year recently, it would be interesting to have a graph with the top 5/10 performances of each year over the past 5/10 years for comparison.
you mention a headwind.
which weather forecast was reporting headwinds? were you able to cross-reference this with actual recorded data?
openwindmap reports the nearby Pic de Pénédis having wind from NNE (ie: almost pure tailwind) at ~15kph https://www.openwindmap.org/owm-937
Yes. People who were there reported a tailwind. This might explain some of the speed, and also puts a bit of an asterisk against there results, impressive as they are.
Vingegaard remarked today that your watt/kg estimations were incredibly accurate
Source: https://sport.tv2.dk/cykling/2024-07-15-vingegaard-bekraefter-estimerede-tal-han-aldrig-tidligere-har-set
Great! Thanks a lot for the article. And congrats to Lanterne Rouge: It is nice to have their estimates confirmed by ground truth!
I don’t speak Danish, but the translation has obvious errors which means anyone but a Danish speaker has to take anything in there with a grain of salt.
Read it closely and you’ll see.
I’m far from naive and have read some of the usual suspects on doping (Bassons, Walsh, Millar, etc) but used to work as an investigations lawyer alongside a former head lawyer of the national anti-doping agency. They told me that cycling was the cleanest major sport (in contrast to their burning criticisms of tennis, track and field, etc) because of the anti-doping regime, and that they had confidence in it. Even in our little country club hours from a major city, members have been at the home of our top rider when there was a knock on the door and the samplers came in to test. There have been major advances in performances in many sports, and since Pantani’s time the peleton has picked up cyclists from far greater international pools. So having heard from people at ground zero, who are dedicated to eradicating doping in sport but feel that cycling is clean (or close to clean) it seems IMHO that we should still keep a open mind about these performances even when aware of the past.
Lance never failed a test. Neither do those today as the Biological Passport ensure that dopers are not caught as the parameters can be carefully manipulated. The organisers nor the UCI want to see fails in testing so there are better ways to circumvent it by having to withdraw due to “Covid” or some other issue. Human physiology cannot change in two decades for clean athletes to beat max juiced Pantani/Ulrich/Lance monsters of the day. If they are clean then it would be good to understand the physiology that allows for such astonishing power outputs for such durations of time with no fatigue or lactic blockage
Most of Pantani’s records were him going solo. If you look at the top performances today they are all aided by massive lead out trains. The first third of the climb Matteo Jorgensen set an infernal pace at over 7W/kg. Then Jonas took a serious pull before Tadej finished the last third of the climb.
The fact that the top ten (I believe) riders set records on this climb speaks to generally favorable conditions in my opinion. Pogačar likely benefitted the most from them, enabling his outright sublime performance that is reflected in the record numbers.
Visma set an incredible pace right into the final ascent and when Jorgensson upped the tempo even further, it was not long before everyone but four other riders where dropped. Then Vingegaard attacked with 10k to go with Pogačar able to stay on his wheel and able to benefit from Jonas’ pacemaking. Tadej then counterattacked with another 5k to go – by the way, incredible race craft by him as this was right on the heels of another Jonas acceleration effort.
So in short, great outright pace early, 5k of incredible pace setting by Jonas and then having the legs to attack strongly for another 5k – that seems like the perfect recipe to set a historic time on the ascent.
Lance WAS caught in 1999, and that’s where the team doctor wrote a backdated TUE for “saddle sores”. Then he “donated” $100,000 to the UCI for improving their testing.
“Armstrong tested positive for a corticosteroid on July 4, 14, 15 and 21 during the 1999 Tour de France”
https://road.cc/content/news/81238-uci-memo-reveals-lance-armstrong-failed-four-doping-controls-during-1999-tour-de
Moi j’aimerais connaître le niveau de pratique de toutes ces bouchasses qui parlent ici de dopage.
En général ce genre de personnes ne cassent pas 3 pattes à un canard en sport surtout qu’ils ne font parler que de watts du fond de leur canapé.
Cycling is simply a sport that you cannot compare era’s or performances. How records are broken, (because that draws the attention) is by improving the equipment and the surfaces being raced on. Weather it track and field, swimming or cycling. You take any of the top athletes from a previous era and give them all of the tools that a current athlete has and they would preform similarly. It’s sport and what matters most is the competition that day. That’s what makes it a great watch. Amazing day and fun conversation, but that’s where the comparison ends. It does raise the question, what is physiologically possible and explain how a “clean” human can generate more power than one using PED’s? I’m fine with the time difference because today’s bikes are significantly faster, but the power output is suspicious. I have a Dogma from 2005 and just purchased the new one. Older and recovering from a heart attack, I immediately took 5 minutes off a 20 mile, 2000 ft. TT that I’ve ridden 100’s of times. Comparing today to yesterday is rudimentary.
It was a tailwind at least according to Jorgenson in Velo news: “ “In an ideal world, we’d have had Sepp after me and we’d have brought Jonas to 5k to go or something. it was a steep climb, had tailwind, there was very limited draft so it didn’t really make so much difference.”