Tour de France verdict: Slovenians Tadej Pogacar and Primoz Roglic soar but champion Egan Bernal primed to pounce

• Full results and standings after stage nine

After nine days of thrills, spills and Covid-19 controls, the race for the maillot jaune at the 107th Tour de France is really starting to take shape now.

Unfortunately for British fans, it looks as if that race will no longer include Adam Yates.

A riveting ninth stage through a wet and misty Pyrenees ended on Sunday with the Briton distanced, surrendering his yellow jersey and almost a minute to the leaders, and a pair of Slovenians in the ascendancy.

Yates had produced a Houdini-like escape on the Peyresourde on Saturday. But he was unable to repeat the trick on Sunday after being dropped on the final climb of the day, the Col de Marie Blanque. He now trails new race leader Primoz Roglic [Jumbo-Visma] by 1min02sec and admitted that he might look to lose time on purpose in order to be allowed more leeway to go for stage wins in the third week.

“It was a big honour riding in yellow,” Yates reflected of his four days in the leader's jersey.  “It was fun while it lasted. I did everything I could."

What a stage it was, though. And what a GC battle it is shaping up to be.

Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates), a 21-year-old rising star of the sport, finished up as the day’s winner – the youngest winner, in fact, of a Tour stage since Lance Armstrong in 1993.

Pogacar outsprinted a select group of riders into Laruns, clawing back yet more of the 80-odd seconds he lost in the crosswinds on Friday and rising to seventh overall, 44 seconds behind the yellow jersey. He will be one to watch closely in the Alps next week. After Egan Bernal became the Tour’s youngest winner in 110 years last year, at the age of 22, some believe Pogacar could rewrite history again just 12 months later.

Bernal is also looking strong. Ineos’s Colombian climber had a much better day on Sunday on what was a special day for the British team, starting as it did in Pau, the home town of Nico Portal, their much-loved sporting director who died suddenly of a heart attack earlier this year.

Bernal attacked repeatedly on the final climb of the day, the vertiginous Col de Marie Blanque, to suggest his form is building at just the right time. And he has his favourite, long Alpine climbs still to come.

But it is Roglic (Jumbo-Visma), Pogacar’s elder compatriot and the big pre-race favourite, who is sitting pretty in yellow as the race heads to Charente-Maritime, on France’s west coast, for Monday’s first rest day.

The Slovenian had looked slightly tentative on the first stage in the Pyrenees on Saturday, deciding against going with Pogacar when the younger rider escaped over the top of the Peyresourde and almost certainly missing the chance to move into yellow as a result. He did not make the same mistake on Sunday.

Sunweb’s Swiss rider Marc Hirschi (Sunweb) – last seen sprinting to second place behind Julian Alaphilippe on stage two – had escaped early in the day and ridden solo for over 80 kilometres in an attempt to pull off what would have been an incredible victory. He almost managed it, too. But when Roglic, Pogacar, Bernal and Mikel Landa (Bahrain-McLaren) put on the afterburners on the Col de Marie Blanque, dropping Yates and a host of other general classification contenders in the process, a lead that once stood at over four minutes quickly came down.

Roglic’s group caught Hirschi with 1.5km of the run-in to Laruns remaining, with Pogacar just outsprinting his fellow Slovenian for the win. Hirschi was third.

Yates, who had fought back brilliantly on Saturday after being dropped on the Peyresourde, came home 54 seconds later in the third “tranche” of race favourites. After four days in yellow, the 28-year-old was justifiably proud, as well as exhausted.

“I said from the very beginning, even before the Tour started, that I wasn’t at 100 per cent [due to illness]," he said. "But I think we did well. We hung on for as long as we could. And yeah, there are a couple of guys going better than me. I think we can be proud.”

Asked whether he might sit up on Tuesday on stage 10 from Ile d’Oleron to Ile de Re – assuming the race is still going ahead after Monday's Covid tests – Yates conceded that he might. “We’ll have to look at it,” he said. “The next couple of days are flat, it might be pretty easy to lose some time, but I think I’m going to look forward to the rest day first before we start thinking about next week.”