Tadej Pogachar enters the 2022 Tour de France in Paris as the favorite to win the overall, but the defending champion will have to attack in the Pyrenees to resume his battle with overall leader Jonas Vingegaard.

Following a rest day in Carcassonne on Monday, the Tour resumes with three straight Pyrenees races. Pogachar, who is 2:22 away from the maillot jaune, will have to make up for his multiple attacks on the Danes in the Alpe d'Huez and Mende.

Pogachar told a UAE Team Emirates press conference on Monday that his goal is to attack as far as possible. He had already caught Vingegaard and Jumbo Visma on the first hill of the day from the start of stage 14 in Mende.

Now, far from the Côte de Saint-Just-Marmont, the high mountains loomed and an epic battle for yellow was underway.

"We need to seize every opportunity," Pogachar said. "You have to attack on every climb. I need to push as hard as I can on the climbs and try to make up time. Every day now is very hard and that is possible. I want to give it my all and have no regrets."

"If I have a chance to attack, I will. There are a lot of chances to try ahead. I think we need to close the gap [before the time trial]. Jonas is good at time trials. [You can't gain 30 seconds or two minutes in the last time trial. You can't bet everything on the last TT."

Pogachar will now face the biggest challenge of his short but highly successful Tour de France career. Five days have passed since the unexpectedly large crash on the Granon Pass, and since that stage many theories have been put forward to explain the Slovenian's "grieving journey."

The dreaded hunger knock is the most popular theory, as the UAE Team Emirates musette was reportedly found at the foot of the mountain. Pogachar did not confirm the story and instead suggested that Jumbo Visma's repeated attacks on the Col de Galibier had more to do with his crack.

"Maybe I was a little short on fuel, but I answered so many attacks in Galibier that it drained my energy. He said, "If I went all out for 10 sprints, Vingegaard and Roglic sprinted only five times. Maybe I should have taken in more fuel."

"I was very happy with my performance.

Since that day, Pogachar has attacked repeatedly in the stages to Alpe d'Huez and Mende. However, Vingegaard was not one step behind him on these final stages.

"I think I'm more motivated. He's the guy to beat. He's super strong. He was with me in the Alpe d'Huez, but if I dig deeper and get more confident, I might be able to get some time off."

"In Mende, it was a shorter climb, more explosive, and he was on my wheel. It was more or less the same; a lot can happen in three days. Everyone is mentally and physically tired, some days are bad, some days are good.

Like UAE Team Emirates, which lost George Bennett and Vegard Stake Rengen, Jumbo-Visma has also been thin in the ranks in recent days with the abstentions of Primož Roglic and Steven Kruijswijk.

Both teams now have six players left in the race (the Ineos Grenadiers team with third-place finisher Geraint Thomas has all eight).

"If you look at the numbers of how many riders each team has, I would say we are more or less the same. How hard it was for us when we lost Begarde and George Bennett." I know how hard it was for us when we lost Begarde and George Bennett.

"They need to defend their jerseys. I need to attack them. The Pyrenees stage is very hard, so I think it will be man-to-man. Everyone will be on full gas, not just Jumbo and us. I think more or less everyone will be racing from the start.

"I don't think of it as an alliance. They are in a good position with three riders in the top ten, so if they attack, Jumbo will have to respond. But at the moment they seem to be racing just for the podium and the team split.

"I'm going to race the team and myself, and I'm going to try as hard as I possibly can."