Pogačar thrills on Parisian cobbles to seal fourth crown

28 Jul 2025 - The Guardian

Jeremy Whittle

Tadej Pogacar ignited an explosive final stage of the Tour de France in Paris, from Mantes-la-Ville to the Champs Élysées, while sealing his fourth overall victory in the race since 2020.

Despite a downpour on the cobbles of Montmartre, Pogačar put in a daredevil performance, attacking on each of the three climbs to the Sacré Coeur, only to be finally distanced by the stage winner Wout van Aert, of the Visma Lease a Bike team.

Pogacar had effectively confirmed his fourth Tour de France win during the final stage, after the cobbled climbs and descents over the Côte de la Butte Montmartre were neutralised because of the wet conditions, ensuring there would be no more changes to the overall standings.

With the Tour won, there was no incentive for the Slovene to attack, but a prestigious stage victory was still at stake and on the first climb of Montmartre he and Van Aert led a group in pursuit of Julian Alaphilippe, who had made the first move on the steep cobbles of Rue Lepic.

Despite the torrential rain, Pogačar and five others moved clear. Another devastating acceleration on the final climb of Rue Lepic blew the lead group apart, but Van Aert clung on and his power eventually took him past the Slovene and ahead to victory.

Pogacar, whose previous wins came in 2020, 2021 and 2024, comfortably beat his closest rival, Jonas Vingegaard, by almost four and half minutes, in what both riders acknowledged was the hardest edition of the race they have competed in.

In his post-victory press conference, Pogacar said that fatigue was perhaps his biggest threat during this Tour. “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 said. “For now, I don’t want to speak about what went wrong but for now I want to enjoy this moment with the yellow jersey in Paris.”

Germany’s Florian Lipowitz, in his Tour debut, finished third, while Scotland’s Oscar Onley, riding only his second, placed fourth overall.

Stage wins in Rouen, Mûr-de-Bretagne, Hautacam and Peyragudes, further confirmed Pogacar as the most accomplished rider of his generation. He also won the 2024 Giro d’Italia, the 2024 World Road Race championship, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Strade Bianche, the Tour of Flanders and multiple other stage races including Paris-Nice, Critérium du Dauphiné and the Tour of Catalunya.

In his wake, the hapless Vingegaard has every reason to feel hard done by, although his pledge to risk all in pursuit of the yellow jersey, even if it meant losing second place, never materialised, save for on Mont Ventoux. It is the Dane’s misfortune he is racing in the era of Pogacar. He would almost certainly have added to his tally of two Tour wins if the Slovene was not his contemporary.

At the same time, his Visma Lease a Bike team never had the measure of the task facing them and internal politics, cited by his wife Trine Vingegaard Hansen even before the race began, have also played their part.

“It can’t be good for Jonas if you also focus on stage wins for others,” Hansen said. “You can only have respect for how Pogacar does it. When he’s at the start of a race, there’s no doubt about who the leader is.”

The uncertainty over Visma Lease a Bike’s commitment to the cause became increasingly obvious as the race went on. As a contest, it was definitively over after the stage to Mont Ventoux, when Vingegaard’s most determined attacks went unrewarded. After consecutive defeats in the Tour by Pogacar, the Dane’s long-term future with the Visma Lease a Bike team is now the subject of growing speculation.

Elsewhere, Ineos Grenadiers continue to look a spent force in terms of contending for the yellow jersey, but other Anglophone talents have come to the fore, with Onley and Ireland’s Ben Healy, who placed ninth, both having excellent Tours.

Onley’s unexpected performance, in a gruelling Tour in which his own team manager, Matt Winston, had expected him to fall away, was one of the highlights of the race.

Healy’s stage win in Vire and his brief spell in the yellow jersey, allied to his top-10 finish, have reinforced his status as a team leader and fuelled his ambitions for future Grand Tours.

But this was Pogačar’s Tour. Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour, when asked yesterday if Pogačar’s domination was credible, said: “Cycling has to live with the doubts, with suspicion, given the history of the sport.”

He added: “Pogačar was third in the Vuelta a España at just 20 years old and, when he won in 2020, he was the youngest winner of the Tour since 1904. He’s a champion who wins from February to October, a champion who can win the Classics, challenge Mathieu van der Poel in Paris-Roubaix and dominate in the Pyrenean stages of the Tour, against Jonas Vingegaard. Yes, we hoped for more of a duel, but it wasn’t to be.”

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Slovene’s rivals must work out how to dethrone a champion at the very top of his game

Tadej Pogacar has mastered all the challenges set by organisers

28 Jul 2025 - The Guardian

William Fotheringham

Fourth Tour wins are, I once wrote, “more for the record books than the heart … the penultimate step to cycling greatness, [they] often do little to warm the soul at the time”. The past three weeks suggests nothing has changed. It’s far from the four stages of grief, but you could argue a first Tour win is met with surprise and delight, a second admiration, the third respect, the fourth resignation.

As Tadej Pogacar’s fourth Tour win approached with the inevitability of a steamroller this week the chief cycling writer at l’Equipe, Alex Roos, grumbled about the Slovene’s lack of joie de vivre. “For the last few days, his sulks, his grumbles, his bad mood have blurred and eaten away at the ambience of the end of this Tour, because how can you get enthusiastic if the Yellow Jersey himself gives the impression of being bored and going through something painful…?”

Pogacar’s fourth Tour win was inevitable – with the usual “barring this or that” proviso – from the moment 19 days ago when the first time check during the time trial around Caen gave him an unbridgeable advantage over Jonas Vingegaard. Similarly, the fourth wins for Bernard Hinault, Miguel Induráin, Lance Armstrong and Chris Froome were all telegraphed by the end of week one: nonetheless admirable as athletic achievements – Armstrong’s excepted – but zero suspense. Hence the feeling of resignation.

Pogacar could be forgiven if he seemed slightly underwhelmed with proceedings this week. This has been a particularly intense, brutal and attritional Tour, with barely any respite, and the stage to Pontarlier on Saturday summed this up: a two-wheeled equivalent of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Pogacar may be physically on top of things, with an unbridgeable margin over Vingegaard, but there was still plenty of potential for the unforeseen, plenty to get stressed about.

The bulk of the stages of this 2025 Tour were as intense as Saturday’s but that has not happened by chance; it is the culmination of a process that began in 2007, when the race director, Christian Prudhomme, set out on a mission to sex up the race for television. Since then, the men who devise the route have gone out of their way to avoid the lengthy, flat, formulaic stages that once were the hallmark of the early phase of the race, and many of the “stages of transition”.

The days when a sprinter such as Mario Cipollini could take four successive stages (1999) are long gone. Now, thanks to Prudhomme’s routefinder-general Thierry Gouvenou, visiting innocuous places such as Rouen, Toulouse or Carcassonne entails daunting climbs and descents that make for compelling TV viewing.

Again to encourage the attackers, stages over 200km are now the exception while time bonuses at all the finishes encourage potential winners to contest every stage they can. Every day on the Tour, it seems, now has the intensity and unpredictability of a one-day Classic in miniature; every day is massively compelling to watch.

Since leaving Lille on 5 July, the Tour men have enjoyed one stage which the pattern of the past: day eight to Laval. The “American quarter-hour” – the term given to the margin Armstrong’s US Postal team would give each day’s breakaway – has been consigned to history. This year, not even the final promenade into Paris is sacred, but a mini-Classic in its final kilometres.

If Pogacar is finding the intensity of the race a bit much, then we should savour the irony; if ever there was a bike racer suited for the current made-for-TV Tour, he is that one. It’s no coincidence that he has won the Tour of Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and shone in Paris-Roubaix since taking his first Tour in 2020: the intensity; the bike-handling skill; the need to hold position in the peloton and the repeated maximal efforts demanded by the spring one-day Classics are now the perfect preparation for La Grande Boucle. Hence the emergence of other current stars: Mathieu van der Poel, Ben Healy, Wout van Aert, and “punchy” riders such as Kévin Vauquelin.

The new-look Tour favours the complete bike racer, just as the Tours of the Induráin years were built for a time trialist. Vingegaard struggles to hang on to Pogacar in the Tour’s punchy stages, and that’s not a surprise: the Dane is not a Classic rider in the same register as Pogacar – the last time he was seen in a spring Classic was 2022, when he failed to finish Flèche Wallonne or Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

In fact, you could argue that Vingegaard is doing shockingly well to hold Pogačar, given his obvious comfort zone is the high mountains.

The new-look Tour offers far more openings than Tours of the past, which presents opportunities that were not there in the Froome or Induráin years: however, if you want to beat the reigning champion, you have to out-Pogi Pogi: build a team that can take the race to the Slovene on a daily basis and eventually crack him.

In the real world, however, Vingegaard’s Visma tried to do just that in the past three weeks, and self-destructed in the process. As a result, Pogačar’s rivals face the same conundrum of those of Hinault, Induráin, Armstrong and Froome: how to defeat a champion on top of his game, who has mastered the challenges the organisers have thrown at him and is supported by a team that has grown in confidence and experience each year? You can tweak the Tour all you will, but some things never change.