Tadej Pogačar was credited with the same time as Jonas Vingegaard after stage 5 of the Tour de France, even though he crossed the line 12 seconds earlier. The decision kept the two GC rivals level on the day after a sprint-stage finish that was broken up by crashes and riders scattered across the road.
Vingegaard finished 52nd after a late crash left him stranded and forced him to jump onto a teammate's bike before the line. That was the moment that made the stage look like it would split the race, but the timing did not work that way.
The reason sits in the three-second rule that has been in place since the middle of the 2017 season. On sprint stages, race commissaires do not apply it as a blanket cut-off. They look at the gaps between groups, and the standard one-second rule says a new time is only given when there is a difference of one second or more between the back wheel of the last rider in one group and the front wheel of the first rider in the next.
Marc Reef said there were riders in between everywhere and no gaps of three seconds had opened. He also said there were about ten seconds between Pogačar and Jonas, but with riders in between, and that everyone ahead of Vingegaard was within three seconds of one another. In practice, that meant the commissaires saw one broken line of riders rather than separate groups with enough space between them to create new time splits.
That is why the finish produced a result that looked contradictory from the roadside. Pogačar was first across the line and Vingegaard was far enough behind to lose the sprint picture, but not far enough, in the commissaires' reading of the gaps, to lose time in the GC standings. The late chaos mattered for the eye, but the rule mattered for the clock.
For Vingegaard, the immediate damage was avoided even though the stage still left him with a damaged finish and a long explanation. The next question is whether later sprint stages produce the kind of clean separation that makes the same rule easier to apply, or whether another messy finish leaves the standings to be decided by riders in between instead of the gap at the line.
