Michael Woods secures big win at top of famed Tour de France mountain as Pogacar closes gap on Vingegaard

PUY DE DOME, France: On the same mountain where five-time Tour de France champion Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor wrote themselves into race history 59 years earlier, all eyes Sunday were on Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar’s continued rivalry at cycling’s biggest race.

Neither Vingegaard nor Pogacar finished first at the summit of the Puy de Dome after Canadian Michael Woods delivered an impressive solo effort to claim the biggest success of his career.

But the fierce rivals, riding well behind the day’s breakaway they had allowed to form, were again in the spotlight.

The two have been in a fierce duel since the start in Bilbao, Spain, of this year’s pulsating Tour and will certainly enjoy Monday’s first rest day.

Vingegaard, the defending champion from Denmark after he dethroned Pogacar last year, had the upper hand in the first round of their battle in altitude. His Slovenian rival responded in style to regain time in the next two mountain stages.

With two weeks of racing remaining, only 17 seconds separate the two in the general classification, with Vingegaard wearing the yellow jersey.

Jai Hindley is in third place, 2 minutes, 40 seconds off the pace.

Vingegaard and Pogacar’s confrontation Sunday on the steepest part of the climb up to the Puy de Dome was not as dramatic as the duel between Anquetil and Poulidor back in 1964, when the two French rivals engaged in a “mano a mano” for the ages.

But amid silence reigning in the thin air — the road leading up to the top of the mountain is so narrow that fans had not been allowed access — the two teamed up for another epic moment, again in a class of their own, with Pogacar in the role of the attacker.

After another great collective effort from