Opinion: First blood to Tadej Pogacar in bid for Tour de France hat-trick as Jumbo-Visma put up a good fight

Filippo Ganna, Wout van Aert and Tadej Pogacar all leaving the start gate one after the other was always going to provide the key pivot for Friday’s opening 13.2km time trial – although Jumbo-Visma duo Primoz Roglic and Jonas Vingegaard had already got their respective Tours off to an assured start in what proved to be fairly treacherous conditions in Copenhagen. Neither Roglic nor Vingegaard were able to dislodge early leader Dutchman Mathieu van der Poel from the hotseat but both riders – to the delight of the home crowds, in the case of Vingegaard – put in highly respectable times just a few seconds slower than the Alpecin-Deceuninck leader.

Ad/> World champion Ganna’s ITT was always going to be the main reference for those gunning for glory – and so it proved to be when the Italian debutant ended Van der Poel’s time at the top by three seconds. It could well have been more: it later emerged that Ganna had ridden the last part of the course with a slow puncture which not only slowed him down but would have made cornering in the wet conditions even harder.

Tour de FranceTour de France 2022 Stage 1 — Route map, how to watch as Grand Tour starts14 HOURS AGO And corners were something this opening time trial had in abundance – 24 of them, to be precise. Just ask Stefan Bisseger, the Swiss specialist driving a 64-tooth chain ring who came a cropper on two of them.

Lampaert stuns big names to win Stage 1 time trial in rainy Copenhagen Given Ganna’s plight, it was no surprise in hindsight that Van Aert knocked him out of a winner’s enclosure in which he didn’t even have time to set foot – the Belgian making light of the knee injury he was supposedly carrying into the race. The third of the stellar starting trio to cross the