But that's not my point. I was trying to say that if 2nd GT tiers like Hindley or Kuss were there, they would lose yesterday 1 min/1 min 15 s to Pogacar, and the perfomance of Pogacar wouldn't look outrageous like it appeared to be due to the gaps between Pogacar and those 3rd GT tiers.
Great, so let’s say they are here. All that means is Pogacar wins by 4-7 mins (potentially) instead of almost 10 while this isn’t his primary objective. Pogacar still looks head and shoulders above the rest while saving energy for the Tour and continues to assert that he is the clear number two in Grand Tours all while squashing any of those that were hyping Thomas winning this race before the start.
But neither Hindley or (especially) Kuss have looked good this year and to put the cherry on top, Kuss lost 8’20 to Pog in a week. So you have no basis for the assertion that Pogacar wouldn’t have embarrassed them as well.
This is what you said in regards to Hindley so you obviously think highly of him to perform similar to Pogacar against the others here.
I risk to say even guys like Hindley would look like Merckx on this race, due to this field being so weak.
Even Hindley would had won this race eqsily with 5/6 wins. I'm not even going to talk about Vingegaard, Remco or Roglic.