At this point in last year's Tour de France, Matej Mohoric could already be celebrating a successful race with a solo victory from a breakaway group on stage 7 at Le Creusot.

He repeated the feat two weeks later in Libourne, but neither he nor his Bahrain-Victorias teammate have been able to replicate the same result in this year's Tour. [Only two successful breakaways by Simon Clark and Bob Jungels. Mohoric's teammate Fred Wright came within 3km of the Lausanne uphill finish on Saturday.

"I thought there would be a lot of successful breakaway stages in this Tour de France - as there have already been three - but it wasn't to be," Mohoric told Cycling News before stage 9.

"It's a lot different from last year," he added, referring to the 2021 race in which he won eight stages after an early breakaway.

"I think they (UAE Team Emirates and Jumbo Visma) wasted - or not wasted because they won the stages afterwards - but they spent a lot of energy chasing the breakaway group.

"So they can't do that for the rest of the Tour. Sooner or later, it will be two races in one, with the breakaway group going for the stage and the GC riders fighting each other."

Mohoric himself has yet to join the breakaway in this year's Tour, but he is looking for opportunities in future stages while supporting the team's GC leader, Damiano Caruso.

"There are always chances, and there are a lot of stages that look good on paper," he said. But you need to feel the moment and get a little lucky."

Mohoric's lack of success so far in the race, he says, is not because conditions have not been as good as in 2021. Rather, he points to "a lot of wasted energy" due to the very fast pace of the race over the past nine days.

The numbers support Mohoric's claim, with an average speed of 44.544 km/h over the nine stages, 2 km faster than the same point in 2021.

"I think we are at the same level physically," he said. But it's been a fast race so far." Tough, demanding stages have yet to be ridden. The stages that were easy on paper were in fact very hard and demanding.

"We wasted a lot of energy there, but let's see what happens when we get into the actual tough stages with meters of climbing."