If Primož Roglič finally succeeds in conquering the Tour de France this summer, at 34 years and nine months, he won’t just become the race’s second oldest ever winner. He’ll also have finally laid a good many ghosts of missed opportunities and misfortunes in the Tour, and elsewhere, to rest. To understand how ill-starred Roglič’s relationship with the Tour has been, you have to rewind to 2020, of course, and how clearly he looked to be on track to victory that year.
Indeed, when he crossed the finish line to claim the stage 4 win at Orcieres-Merlette - which, amazingly for a rider as successful as Roglič, remains his most recent victory at the Tour - it had all the feel of a hefty down payment on a serious bid to triumph overall. Yet with uncanny similarity to the fate that befell the first-ever winner in the Alpine ski station, Luis Ocaña in 1971, Roglič ended up in yellow overall, only to have victory wrenched from him in the most unexpected, and brutal fashion. At Orcieres-Merlette, Ocaña inflicted the most stinging defeat that Eddy Merckx would, by his own admission, ever experience in the Tour, moving into a seemingly unassailable lead.
But then a crash on the Col de Menté (also tackled in this year’s race, as it happens) forced the Spaniard to abandon. So when 49 years later and just when he thought victory was all but a formality, Roglič was left reeling on the Planche des Belles Filles time trial and courtesy of Tadej Pogačar, the paralle.
