Merlier wins stage as Pogacar dominance leaves rivals in shade

Belgian takes stage seven but Slovene’s solo success on Thursday still reverberates

11 Jul 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Jeremy Whittle

Tim Merlier of the Soudal-quick Step team won the seventh stage of the Tour de France in a classic sprinter’s finish on the banks of the Garonne in Bordeaux.

As the Tour headed away from the Pyrenees, through Gascony towards the Atlantic coast, a lull settled over a shell-shocked peloton as it came to terms with the demonstration of domination from Tadej Pogacar in Thursday’s mountain stage to Gavarnie-gèdre.

“What now?” was the question on most lips as the convoy gathered the morning after Pogacar’s Tourmalet masterclass, which took him into a seemingly unassailable lead over his perennial rival Jonas Vingegaard, the winner of this year’s Giro d’italia.

The consensus is that, unless the defending champion crashes or gets ill, victory is already assured. It’s a measure of his superiority that with only six stages of 21 raced so far, the conversation has already moved on to the fight for second and third place.

Geraint Thomas, now director of racing at Netcompany Ineos, who finished third in the Tour to Vingegaard and Pogacar in 2022, described Pogacar’s attack over the Col du Tourmalet as “super-impressive.”

“He had 30 seconds on Vingegaard at the top of Tourmalet, which isn’t crazy, but then he’s great on his own. The descent and the valley definitely favoured him, rather than Jonas.

“So I’m not surprised that the gap went up, but I am surprised it was what it was. What he and his team are doing is phenomenal.”

Thomas commented: “It will be interesting to see how the race goes now and if Visma Lease-a-bike still think that Jonas doing the Giro [before the Tour] was the best thing. They know more than me when it comes to Jonas, but if I was going for the Tour, I’m not sure that the Giro would be the best preparation.”

Thomas agreed with those who think that Vingegaard, with riders such as the Olympic gold medallist Remco Evenepoel, Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates XRG teammate Isaac del Toro and the French prodigy, Paul Seixas, clustered close behind him in the overall standings, may have put at risk a podium finish in Paris. Thomas said: “It’s easy to just assume he’s going to be second, but there are others still riding well. Getting Del Toro into second place will be one of UAE’S big goals. They’ll be talking about that on the bus.”

There was a hasty attempt by Evenepoel’s Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team to paper over the widening cracks in the relationship between the Belgian and his young teammate Florian Lipowitz. After Thursday’s finish, a fuming Evenepoel had launched into an angry tirade about the German. “I had asked for a lead-out, and I didn’t get one,” he said. “I think I was justifiably angry.

“I asked him to ride at the front for one kilometre, and that wasn’t possible. That made me angry, and that will need to be discussed thoroughly.”

But the team manager, Ralph Denk, was quick to play down the fallout from Evenepoel’s outburst, saying that the rift had been exaggerated. “There was a bit of a disagreement, a language barrier, but in the heat of the moment after a 180km mountain stage. There is really nothing major,” Denk said, “and they even sat together at dinner and laughed.”

Thomas, however, lauded the Belgian’s character. “For the fans and media, it’s great. We want character. Obviously, you want to keep those conversations on the bus, but at the same time we want to promote the sport. Having guys like Remco, who wear their heart on their sleeve, is a good thing.”

Pogacar’s biggest Grand Tour winning margin to date was in the 2024

Giro d’italia, which he won by almost 10 minutes, while his biggest in the Tour came in 2024 when he beat Vingegaard by more than six minutes.

His most notable collapse in the Tour came on the Col du Granon in 2022, but a repeat now seems unlikely.

“If I look at my physical capabilities, I’m better than I was back then,” Pogacar said. “I’ve improved my mentality, my experience and one of the biggest changes is the organisation around my feeding, hydration and nutrition.”

Matt White, sports director at the Movistar team, said: “He will be playing games in the coming stages and he will want to get Del Toro on the podium. I can see that happening.

“He’s so relaxed and so confident, it’s crazy. The level of the man is something we’ve never seen before. If he stays healthy, I think it’s over.”

***

Salted codfish and cabbage leaf days are over: how climate crisis is shaping the Tour’s future

11 Jul 2026 - THE GUARDIAN/ Sport

William Fotheringham

The Tour de France and the heat of the midday sun are old bedfellows, going back long before an era when the biggest catastrophe of the Tour’s opening week was a major fault in the Visma team bus’s air conditioning. Flip back 50 years to my favourite Tour read, Geoffrey Nicholson’s The Great Bike Race, and we find the doyen of cycling writers discussing a Tour that began in baking conditions in the Vendée, and continued through the canicule in central France and Normandy.

“The heatwave,” wrote Nicholson, “is becoming a serious worry.” He describes Raymond “Pou-pou” Poulidor as “an old sweat” – pun alert – “in legionnaire matters”, who was “careful to limit himself to two litres of water on a stage … it is part of the collective wisdom of the peloton that too much water leads to depression and fatigue.” Tell that to the Tour men of 2026 as they glug down one bidon after another.

Nicholson harks back to heatwaves now long forgotten; “the summer of 1951 when suffering from the Languedoc sun, Fausto Coppi lost 33 minutes on the stage to Montpellier. More recently, and nearer home, there was the dog-day Tour of 1957 when the baking roads of Normandy forced 66 of the 120 [starters] to retire.”

The twist is that Nicholson was describing the notorious drought year, 1976, but even so, the temperatures he describes bear little resemblance to the Tour de Furnace of 2026: 25C in the Vendée in late June, 29C on the road to Caen.

These days, as they stuff stockings filled with ice down their necks and supply urine samples to be tested for dehydration, the riders are probably longing for such conditions. “Like riding into a hair dryer,” said one of the 40-degree temperatures this week.

The primitive wisdom of yore around racing in the heat in the Tour now sounds like medieval witchcraft. In the 1960s, when Tom Simpson became the Tour’s most notorious heat victim, dying on Mont Ventoux while using amphetamines, in temperatures that allegedly burst a thermometer in the cafe on the mountain’s slopes, the race rules restricted the riders to four bidons a day (probably the basis for Pou-pou’s two litres); two bottles at the start on their bikes, two more at the official ravitaillement (refuelling station).

Feeding from team cars was banned, until Simpson’s death eventually prompted a rethink. With no bidons coming their way, the riders raided bars en route or stopped to fill bottles at roadside springs, occasionally catching dire bacterial infections.

With no awareness of how heat affected the body, some riders ate salted codfish while training, to attune their systems to dehydration; as late as the 1980s, cycling magazines showed pictures of competitors stuffing cabbage leaves down the backs of their racing hats to keep the sun off the nape of the neck.

Gradually, as temperatures have inexorably risen, bike racing has had to seek out more and more inventive measures. In 2004, the Great Britain cycling team began using chairs with built-in ice baths in which riders would plunge their hands up to the wrists to lower core temperature.

It was 2010 when Team Sky, then working with Gatorade, began testing their riders’ individual mineral needs in an attempt to optimise their hydration; in the Tour that year, it was all ice baths and ice stockings.

In this Tour, a single team might get through 80 to 100kg of ice in a day; more if you include their custom-made ice lollies with personalised salt levels.

There is only so far this can go, however, as there is only so far the human body can be made to adapt. Global heating is bound to force the race organisers into some profound rethinking at some point, ironically enough for a sport where so many teams are backed by oil companies and petro-dollar regimes. This might seem unlikely, but rethinks happen fast: it is only a few years ago that there was relative insouciance about the race’s carbon profile; now, at least spectators are encouraged to attend on their bikes and the use of electric vehicles in the diesel-heavy cavalcade is rising.

The prospect of having finishes without spectators – as happened at Les Angles this week – is not going to draw stage towns, who host the Tour, to prompt tourist spend.

In the late June heatwave, amateur races around France were cancelled or amended to avoid danger to spectators and riders and on top of the heatwave, the Tour head honchos are probably keeping an eye on extreme rainfall in the Alps, where there have been mudslides on the Col de Sarenne similar to the ones that ruined the 2019 finale.

Perhaps, sooner than we think, even the Tour’s sacred July date and primetime television lateafternoon stage finishes may have to change. The days of cabbage leaves and salted cod are long gone. Different, even more torrid times await.