"Every Tour has days like this," said Wout Van Aert after finishing his cool down in front of the Jumbo-Visma team bus in Issoire after stage 10. Maybe so, but one can't shake the impression that in the supersonic days of Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogachar, it happened more regularly at the Tour de France.

In the past, the Tour de France's passage through the Massif Central was almost inevitably a transition stage; ONCE's all-out attack against Miguel Indurain on the road to Mende in 1995 was dramatic for its rarity. For most of his five years as reigning Tour champion, Indurain had been able to ride these days in relative peace. Men like Tony Rominger were never so tactless as to try to make an early break.

In the Tour, as in Ashes cricket, the old unwritten rules no longer apply in the 21st century. This was evident on Tuesday morning as the riders warmed up outside the team bus in Vulcagna, despite temperatures in the upper 30s.

There will be no gentle return to duty here after the first rest day of the Tour de France.

But with Pogachar joining the early attack and yellow jersey Vingegaard soon following, the warp factor of the early run was dramatically increased.

When the two attacked in the mountains, the inexorable logic of their power-to-weight ratio instantly separated them from the rest of the field.

But when a rider like Pogachar accelerates in the first kilometer on a day like Tuesday, it's like yelling "fire" in a movie theater. It's like yelling "fire" in a movie theater.

The high-tension marks of Pogachar and Vingegaard were one of the key drivers of the early 22-player action that formed after Moreno, and the tension injected by this initial skirmish permeated most of the day. Everyone seemed to want to get in on the action, or at least feared being left behind.

"It was a very intense start. Basically everyone was jumping," Vingegaard modestly assessed.

"There were a lot of different scenarios, a lot of different breakaways. Eventually, I think it was a little later, we ran out of breaks."

Fred Wright (Bahrain Victorious) reached for a stronger adjective. He said, "The start was terrible. There were places where Pogachar and Vingegaard went up in a group. We did everything we could with ice gel, lots of ice."

Van Aert briefly fell off, and David Gaudoux also had a long, frantic chase on the rugged terrain. The winning break did not form until mid-stage, but it still took quite some time for the escape group to completely break away from the peloton.

Tom Southam, director sportif of EF Education-Easy Post, watched the carnage of the first few kilometers of this stage from the roadside. He had been driving the car before the race to offset the effects of the heat wave, which had been a concern long before Pogachar raised the temperature.

"It was very, very hard. I got on the road early to add Bidon Point, but the start was ....... It was a very hard race," Southam told Cycling News.

Esteban Chaves joined the EF breakaway and then cleared alone on the climb to Saint-Victor-la-Rivière to finish fifth on the stage. Southam, however, was puzzled by the difficulty of finding a breakaway on the day. Perhaps this is only a partial explanation for stage winner Pero Bilbao (Bahrain Victorious), who gained nearly three minutes and is currently in fifth place overall.

"There were a lot of things I didn't understand today. But then all of a sudden one team starts pulling and you think, 'Why did this happen, why didn't they let me brake?'" Southam said.

"Even towards the end, they were running hard behind the break and it was like ...... It was a little puzzling. But this is the Tour. Secondary conditions like that are going to be what will establish you in the team class and in the top 10 in the second week."

Despite relative détente among the GC men in the final hour of the race, the pack finished within three minutes of each other. With Pogachar and Vingegaard setting the pace with their early attacks, the average speed was 43.1 km/h.

"There were a lot of jumps at the start and I don't remember exactly how we went into the break, but eventually me and Sep [Kuss] went into the break," said Vingegaard. After finishing in the main group with Pogachar, he said he still had a 17-second lead in the overall standings. The UAE had Pogachar, (Adam) Yates, (Rafal) Mica, and maybe one other guy. It wasn't an ideal situation for us.

Pogachar claimed to be surprised by the intensity of the stage, as if he had not noticed that the flapping of wings tends to cause hurricanes. 'Honestly, I thought it would be a bit easier, but I'm not experienced enough yet,' Pogachar said. I'm glad it's over because it was one of the toughest stages of the Tour so far."

The Slovenian claimed that he was aware during the early attack battle that riders like Gaudoux and Romain Bardet had been separated by a large distance. It seems that all Pogachar saw was the road ahead. It is the epitome of the relentlessness of the modern tool.

"I didn't even know they had fallen off," Pogachar said. 'Who was there and who was there. At that point, it didn't matter anymore who was there."

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