Tadej Pogačar continues to dominate the 2024 Tour de France with his fifth win in a mountain stage in a single Grand Tour. Jonas Vingegaard pushed high watts, but not enough to beat the Slovenian.
It was the last mountain day in this Tour de France. The stage finished up the one of the most regular climbs in pro cycling, Col de la Couillole (15.8 km, 7.3%). Richie Porte’s climbing record had zero chance of surviving, as the 2024 Tour de France has some of the strongest climbers in the history of cycling.
Before the final climb Derek Gee had spent 3,535 kilojoules for 3:26h at 14.87 kj/kg/h. The peloton used a copy and paste button from yesterday’s stage to Isola, where Gee had spent 3,478 kilojoules for 3:26h at 14.71 kj/kg/h. The pace on the climb was good—5.85 ᵉW/Kg on Braus, 5.25 ᵉW/Kg for 25 min on Turini and 5.45 ᵉW/Kg for 38 min Colmiane with the last 19 minutes being at 6.00 ᵉW/Kg.
Soudal Quick-Step were pacing for Remco Evenepoel and potential stage victory from the GC group as the loaded breakaway with the previous generation’s GC stars Richard Carapaz, Enric Mas, Romain Bardet, Wilco Kelderman had a low chance to survive. After Mikel Landa had finished his turn, Evenepoel attacked for five seconds but immediately stopped as Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar could easily follow his wheel. Joao Almeida set a high pace and Evenepoel attacked again but unsuccessfully. Vingegaard countered and dropped the Belgian. Pogačar and Vingegaard easily caught Mas and Carapaz with the Dane pulling more than the Slovenian. In the final metres, Pogačar cruised to his 16th Tour de France stage with a powerful sprint.
Pogačar averaged 6.52 ᵉW/Kg for 39:24 min. Vingegaard did more work at the front and despite losing pushed 6.56 ᵉW/Kg, reaching the pink trendline. Pogačar could have probably pushed at least 0.3–0.4 ᵉW/Kg more, if not more, but that was enough as he did the minimum to win another stage. Richie Porte’s record was broken by 2:34 min. 6.15 ᵉW/Kg for 41:51 min in the 2017 edition of Paris-Nice was enough to beat Alberto Contador and was a top 5-7 climbing performance in Porte’s career. Almeida, Jorgenson, Evenepoel, Landa, Yates and Jorgenson all did performances above the red trend-line, which was extremely rare from 2011 to 2019. The 2022 Tour of Norway with Evenepoel’s effort on Stavsro changed everything, as after that it became a norm.
Vingegaard added his fourth performance in the all-time great climbing effort graph. Only Marco Pantani now has more, with nine All Time Top 40 performances. In the 2024 now six different riders has reached this level – Pogačar (3x), Vingegaard (2x), A. Yates, Skjelmose, Almeida and Evenepoel. The 42.5 km long Tour de Suisse stage might have been the easiest possible road stage with Skjelmose, Almeida and A. Yates all doing high watts with fresh legs up Blatten. But it is still impressive, as almost no one had done better pure watts even in a mountain time-trial in the last 20 years.
Pogačar now has a 5-minute lead over Vingegaard before the final time-trial, where the biggest intrigue will be if Pogačar can take his sixth 2024 Tour de France stage win against Evenepoel, who was better in the first, flatter, time-trial.
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I think I don’t understand what normalizing to a weight of 60 kg means. Does this mean the calculations assume that every rider has a weight of 60 kg’s? Would this not make the concept of the W/kg metric redundant since what is being compared is just the average estimated wattage of each rider divided by 60?
The reasons they do that is because the bike weight is fixed, so it will be a smaller proportion of total weight the higher the rider weight is. This means that an 80kg rider pushing 6 w/kg will go much faster than a 55kg rider pushing 6 w/kg.
By normalising weight the numbers are more comparable
yeah theres a LOT of error/speculation baked into this. example: classics riders like MVDP will easily lose double the water weight of a GC type body/ and will be pushing some serious watt/kilo at the end of an uber long classics ride. youd have to weigh riders before and after stages to get better accuracy. And/or before and after an actual climb to be truly accurate.
I mean, wow – these guys pushing similar WPS as Riijs 1996 in Hautacam (60% mutant period of the bald Dane) makes me rethink everything. They definitely found some new juice, otherwise the rise in WPS over the years in inexplicable.