Primoz Needs More Vuelta and Less Giro
I wrote this for my neophyte newsletter (called Cobbles & Climbs by the way, not that we've had any cobbles yet) that I started up during unemployment because of Covid. I know some of this is elementary for most here but I decided to post it here anyway since I've been lurking around here occasionally commenting for years (much of my audience is American and has no idea what cycling is about other than the Tour).
May 24, 2019 - Giro d’Italia Stage 13 - Pinerolo - Ceresole Reale (Lago Serru)
Primoz Roglic begins the day in second place overall, 4’07" behind Jan Polanc who is not a contender to win the race in the slightest and has the lead only because he got into a big breakaway the day before. Roglic to this point has looked impeccable at the Giro having won both time trials and leading the other contenders for the overall by nearly 2 minutes. If Roglic can simply finish together with his rivals on this day and the next, he is likely to win the Giro, especially with a time trial on the final day.
Early on the final climb with a large breakaway up the road, Mikel Landa attacks, Roglic lets him go. This is a sensible move. Landa at this point has had a horrible time trial and a middling time trial. He sits over 4 minutes behind Roglic. A few kilometers later, Roglic again waits and watches as Landa’s teammate Richard Carapaz goes up the road. While Carapaz is much closer to Roglic and has a stage win already at this point, he is still three minutes down on Roglic, who stays with Vincenzo Nibali.
If this sounds familiar, let’s go back to stage 9 of this year’s Tour de France. On the Peyresourde, Tadej Pogacar attacks. He is over a minute down after losing time in the crosswinds the previous day. Roglic bridges up to him. Then sits on his wheel. Conservatively. Just as in the Giro. Pogacar slows up and waits for the group before attacking again. Eventually he gets away and Egan Bernal does exactly what Vincenzo Nibali did when Landa and Carapaz attacked at the 2019 Giro…sit on Roglic’s wheel and let the threat who is behind go.
Those who follow all of cycling closely will know how the 2019 Giro ended: Carapaz pulled the same maneuver the next day and the same thing happened. Roglic and Nibali stared at each other and Carapaz rode away on his way to taking the pink jersey. He never game it up and Roglic eventually finished third after a crash on Stage 15 combined with some Benny Hill style stupidity from his team car cost him more time.
So now I ask if Roglic and Jumbo-Visma are making the same mistake. In the 2019 Giro Roglic got so focused on former champion Nibali that he let the race get away from him. Why? Because he raced conservatively. It is worrisome that Roglic has left chances to take time on the road without doing so. He burned his best tactical domestique in Tom Dumoulin on the Peyresourde stage and then didn’t attack or go with Pogacar when he had the chance. His team seemed so afraid of Ineos getting into the breakaway on Stage 9 that his team chased down every move for 60 km. Meanwhile Pogacar won the stage in a sprint beating Roglic.
This conservatism doesn’t fit Roglic as a rider and it doesn’t make any sense. Roglic has won stages of the Tour in the past as an attacker. Additionally, his elite time trialing seems to become merely good in the third week of Grand Tours, even as his climbing remains strong. In the 2018 Tour, all Roglic needed to do to finish on the podium was beat a very tired Chris Froome in the final time trial the day after a mountain stage win. He failed and finished fourth overall. Roglic also failed to gain any time on the final stage time trial in the 2019 Giro. All of this points to not being able to count on winning the final time trial, especially since he didn’t even win his Slovenian Time Trial Championship this year. The winner: Pogacar.
All of this seems to point to Roglic throwing this Tour away. But he still has a chance to recover. He is in the yellow jersey after all. He just needs to take lessons from the correct Grand Tour. After his disappointment in the Giro, Roglic won the Vuelta last year. How? He attacked. Regularly. You don’t win the Points classification as a GC rider, even in a Grand Tour more suited to do so, without attacking riding. Sure he only won one stage, but he and his team blew the field apart multiple times. It looked like the best of his week long stage race wins: take time in the time trial and then attack to keep the pressure on rather than defend. Of course there is one problem Roglic may have with this strategy. For all the good he did on his way to a Vuelta win, the winner of three stages in that race was Pogacar.