Jonas Vingegaard sentences the Tour with a legendary victory in Hautacam

• Classification This is the Tour

He won the Tour like the greats, an image for history, a little Dane in yellow, with his arms raised in Hautacam, hand to his heart, kiss to the sky.

capped off his extraordinary endurance exercise with a solemn victory in the Pyrenees, the culmination of any doubt about his strength.

He finished

, a rival that makes him great, the one who didn't stop harassing him until he didn't have an ounce of energy left in his legs.

An undisputed leader in the effort, a leader of greatness in the fight: on the way down from Spandelles, when the guy who wanted to take the glory from him went to the ground, he waited and held out his hand, the photo of this amazing Tour .

[Narration and rankings]

As in Granon, where he inaugurated his legend, Vingegaard only needed one bullet to sentence.

An accurate shot four kilometers from the top that crowned another great strategy lesson from the Jumbo.

He led Pogacar by more than a minute and will go to the Rocadamador time trial on Saturday with an insurmountable lead of three minutes.

The defeated Slovenian arrived, bleeding like an ecce homo, desperate, also heroic in his fall.

They couldn't both stand.

In that descent of Spandelles all the emotion of this Tour was summed up, of two heroes in an indelible battle.

The eagerness of Pogacar, who tirelessly burned all his boats in the unprecedented ascent, up to five times delayed -in the last one, two kilometers from the top, it seemed for a moment that he finally stopped the wheel, but Jonas reacted again -, led him to risk it also on the way down.

He pushed to the point of looking for the bug.

And so it was, the alien and the own.

A mechanical failure, the jump of a change, did not take the leader to the ground by pure miracle.

He mastered his bike, recovered his pulse and returned to his work, to get into the pocket of his rival.

Then Pogacar's scare, passed in a curve, touched the sand of the gutter and went to the ground.

He was able to regain his composure, scratches and rage.

And so,

a gesture of sportsmanship not to forget.

With Hautacam still on the horizon, Vingegaard stopped, waited for his Nemesis, held out his hand as they do after every fight, inquired about her physical condition, and continued riding towards his inseparable destiny.

Whether due to the fall or due to exhaustion, Pogacar was not going to try again.

It was then the time of the Jumbo and of an unclassifiable type.

Wout Van Aert, who has spent more than half the Tour on the run, who wears green and now also with the red dotted mountain jersey, who attacked at the same start in Lourdes and was left alone with Daniel Felipe Martínez in the escape of the day, waited for his partner and broke everything.

Absolute protagonist.

When he was sucked in and Kuss stopped working on him, the Belgian put in a deadly pace that tore Pogacar to shreds.

So he cleared Vingengaard to glory.

The definitive stage had been inaugurated in the Aubisque, which was a mess in which everyone believed they had the necessary impetus to try.

There were more people ahead (including Enric Mas, finally) than in the leader's group, where control of the Jumbo Visma had left him at just over 25 units.

The chaos was not cleared up until its most demanding ramps arrived, until the heat and altitude put things in their place.

So yes, the escape made its way, with 17 units and others, like the indefatigable Luis Mentjes or Luis León Sánchez, trying to hook up from behind.

It seemed like a great occasion for Mas after a bewildering Tour, in his words and in his actions.

And yet, inexplicably, on the descent -blocked, without confidence, without encouragement- he lost his rope and only the help of Gorka Izagirre made him hook up with Mentjes and the impressive Luisle, the fastest man in the Aubisque (40:41 ).

The Balearic soon lost any type of options: he entered more than seven minutes and will not even be among the Top 10 of the Tour.

Tadej Pogacar was waiting.

He couldn't repeat his teammate Berg the previous day's selection, but he couldn't let the kilometers go by without trying either.

It was in Spandelles where he burned McNulty, his only pawn now, not as full as in the previous one.

He where he attacked up to six times, where he again verified that it was impossible to separate from his shadow, where he knew that he will not be able to count three Tours in a run.

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