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As impressive as Australian Jai Hindley has been in the opening week of the Tour de France, history has shown that it’s really weeks two and three where the race comes together.
While a Tour de France stage win and a stint in the yellow jersey is already the stuff of cycling career dreams, standing on the podium in Paris is beyond most rider imaginations.
The 27-year-old Western Australian rider is somewhat of a Grand Tour specialist, his best results remain finishing first and second at the 2022 and 2020 Giro d’Italia, respectively, whereas he has only achieved a podium finish once at a lower-level WorldTour one-week stage race, finishing second at the 2019 Tour of Poland.
“I think one-week races, mate, they’re just too short, it’s not enough time to get going you know,” Hindley said half-jokingly in a pre-Tour de France interview with SBS Sport. “Nah, I don’t know, it’s just a different style of racing to a Grand Tour.
“In a Grand Tour, you’re conservative with your energy, very calculated. Maybe in a week-long race, you don’t have to be so calculated, you can just go all-in every day.
“It is a bit of a different style I’d say. I definitely enjoy three-week races more than one-week or one-day.”
Enjoy isn’t a word that most would associate with riding the Grand Tours, but Hindley does seem to get better and better as the race progresses. If we were to take the same points of the race in the 2020 and 2022 Giros (after Stage 8), Hindley was 11th at 1’33 and 15th at 2’15 (though the gap to best serious GC rider was less at 1’10), races he would finish 2nd and 1st.
Stage 9 was a victory for Hindley in 2022, but it wasn’t convincing, except in the fact that he won a stage when he clearly wasn’t in the best form. He was dropped earlier on the climb and said after the stage that it was the strength of Joao Almeida that brought him back to the front of the race, though cat-and-mouse games helped as well.
Stage 9 at the Tour de France sees Hindley arrive in better shape than his previous career best results. The competition is tougher too.
While Tao Geoghegan Hart and Richard Carapaz are eminent and respected riders in the peloton, Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard increasingly only have each other for comparison. That was shown in the almost arrogance of them letting Hindley go up the road on stage 5 for the stage victory and the yellow jersey, with the battle very much focused on each other.
Hindley can profit from that, we saw last year that Pogacar blew up after repeated mauling from the Jumbo-Visma team on Stage 11, and Vingegaard has already shown signs of over-racing at times in a constant bid to knock Pogacar out of the battle for yellow.
He’s patient, and BORA-hansgrohe have an inventive and cunning sports director in Enrico Gasparotto who can engineer opportunities to put others under pressure. We’ve already seen that on stage 5 and on an amazing stage 14 of the 2022 Giro, where the German team converted an intermediate stage with no climb categorised higher than cat 2 into a big GC day.
The first week has shown that the 2023 Tour de France is going to be a dynamic race, and if Vingegaard and Pogacar keep throwing haymakers at each other, Hindley is going to keep getting stronger and may be in a position to profit, not just for a step on the podium but, if things fall just right, the top one.
