Plugge enjoys battle against UAE, but criticizes Tour organizers: "I would be ashamed, that's not okay"

In the ninth stage, Visma | Lease a Bike shook things up. “We wanted to try what we ended up doing, making the entire stage tough,” Plugge explained to NOS. “We gained a few seconds on the others, and Tadej and Jonas crossed the finish line at the same time. That's fine with us, so it was actually a great day to go into the rest day.”

After Matteo Jorgenson and Sepp Kuss broke away, Pogacar opted for an attack on the final climb. The Slovenian rode everyone off his wheel except Vingegaard. His team manager sees that the specific preparation the Dane underwent to become more explosive is paying off. “He was riding very well in the slipstream, as we've seen before. He's taken that step, which looks very promising.”

So far, the Dutch team has not been able to close the gap with their big rival, and a significant lead remains in the general classification. “It's a three-week race. We have to try to battle them every day, and they're doing the same – and rightly so. That's also a great battle. It's very close; it's fantastic how we're pushing each other. We do it our way; they do it our way. Hopefully, we will prevail this year.”

Praise for UAE, but not for ASO. The Tour organization is getting a lot of criticism from Plugge, who told Cyclingnews that he was not at all satisfied with the promotion of the Tour de France. The trailers for the Netflix documentary Tour de France: Unchained emphasize the negative side of cycling, highlighting crashes as part of the spectacle.

And the Dutchman is not happy about that. 'You don't celebrate cycling by showing crashes; you celebrate cycling by showing the sprint between the riders on the Mur de Bretagne and other sprints, not the crashes. I've told ASO that, but they include crash footage in their promotional videos for the Tour de France. If I were an organizer, I would be ashamed to have crashes in my race. If I were an organizer, I would almost hide them. We should be ashamed of showing crashes to the world because it's not good.“

Plugge is very involved in cycling safety: he is involved with SafeR, the organization that fights for a safer peloton. There, he presented important statistics. "29% of accidents are due to the behavior of the rider, but the remaining 71% can be divided into different categories. If we look at the situation, we can trace everything back to the conditions of the race, for example, the course, such as steep descents or speed bumps."

The UCI used these same percentages as an example, suggesting that riders are the main cause in most cases, but the Dutch team manager sees it the other way around. The remaining 71% is easier to combat than the behavior of the riders, which is already restricted by yellow cards. “The easiest solutions are the route and the surrounding area. The organizers could do better by, for example, not placing speed bumps 150 meters before the finish line.”