The route promised third week drama. The time gaps didn’t. Tadej Pogacar’s lead was 4m13s at the end of last week and, even with Mont Ventoux and the Alps on the menu, that only expanded to 4m24s by the end of the race.
- Stages 1-10
- Stages 11-15
- Stages 16-21
I finished the general classification section of my middle week recap by yearning for a world where Pogacar’s limits might be exposed so that we could all begin to envisage some plausible if unlikely path to victory for another rider in some future year.
We didn’t really get that. On Stage 19, Jonas Vingegaard got a six-second time bonus while Pogacar got four. That was the only time the three-week battle for yellow didn’t entirely go the Slovenian’s way.
Something significant has happened though; something that may well deny Pogacar a Grand Tour victory.
Speaking in a brief press conference after this win, Pogacar said: “We were in the lead and we had quite a big gap, so we were comfortably in yellow. But yeah, I was tired in the last week.”
He was tired! It’s a thing that can actually happen to him! Crumbs of comfort there for his Tour rivals, but rather more than that in the medium-term. Pogacar is in fact so tired that he’s currently unsure whether he’ll actually start the Vuelta a Espana, as planned. Gotta be in it to win it, as they (annoyingly) say.
The sheer relentlessness of the racing in this Tour de France could therefore deny him victory… just not in this race.
The difference
The 2025 Tour showed us that while there are a few up-and-comers, this race is still Pogacar v Vingegaard. No-one else is close.
And even the Dane wasn’t that close. Peaks and troughs of form, he reckoned.
“I can agree that on some stages I have had the highest level that I have ever had and in other stages I have had the lowest level for many years for me.”
The most heartening performance therefore came from 22-year-old, Oscar Onley, who also delivered my favourite moment of the race.
Onley was dropped from the yellow jersey group near the top of the Col de la Madeleine on Stage 18. While it’s not too disastrous to be dropped near the top of a climb when it’s a summit finish, it’s a little more concerning when you still have to go down the other side and then up the 26.4km meandering sod that is the Col de la Loze.
The flipside to getting dropped so early is that you have time to catch up again. It’s just that riders who have been dropped typically aren’t well equipped to achieve that goal.
Here we saw the oh-so-visible benefits of teamwork. Warren Barguil had managed to stay with Onley, while Frank Van den Broek had been in a break that had just been caught. Together they steam-trained their man not merely back up to Pogacar, but straight past him.
After two and a half weeks dwelling on the race leader’s invincibility, it was a comical sight to see a group of riders overtake him at such a pace.
With a head start on the climb and the other riders’ stinging attacks for the most part already executed, Onley was able to finish fourth on the day, en route to fourth overall.
It was a promising debut from the Scot whose greatest strength might well be that he’s young enough that he’ll still be riding when Pogacar finally calls it a day.
RIP ITV’s cycling coverage
I’ve already expressed my crushing disappointment at the loss of ITV’s live coverage and in particular their highlights show, but it’s worth acknowledging that they did at least go out in style.
Throughout the race, they revisited any number of great features only tangentially related to the Tour de France. Highlights for me included the fleet of motorised profiteroles, the armada of pedalos and a big piece about Didi, the roadside devil and all of his inventions back home. I’m confident that actual racing highlights will still be accessible on free-to-air TV next year, but this is the stuff we’ll lose.
A word too for Gary Imlach, who found the most Gary Imlach way to bow out, describing the final stage in Paris as, “not so much the climax, as the cigarette afterwards,” while simultaneously claiming that he would refrain from stooping to anything so crass.
What’s next?
The Vuelta a Espana starts on August 23. Jonas Vingegaard will be there. I wouldn’t especially trust comments made straight after Stage 21 when fatigue is at its deepest, so Pogacar might well be too.
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