Pogacar joins greats as van der Poel wins frantic finale

27 Jul 2026 - The Guardian

Jeremy Whittle 

Paris - Tadej Pogacar took a record-equalling fifth win in the Tour de France yesterday, joining Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin in the canon of the Tour’s most successful cyclists. In a thrilling finale to the Tour, Mathieu van der Poel took his second stage win of the race on the Champs-Élysées, fending off the pursuing pack of sprinters by a tyre’s width, after breaking clear with Pogacar on the final climb of the Butte de Montmartre.

Merckx, widely considered the greatest-ever cyclist because of the breadth of his achievements beyond the Tour itself, believes that Pogacar will now go on to win a sixth Tour. “I don’t think he’ll be content just to draw level with me and the other champions,” the 81-year-old Belgian said. “He’ll soon break our record for Tour victories.”

From Montjuïc to Montmartre, Pogacar and the stifling temperatures suffocated the 2026 Tour. A race staged against the backdrop of heatwaves and wildfires, culminated in the inevitable – another win for the relentless Slovene.

Pogacar had no equal in this Tour de France, breaking records on two of the most daunting climbs in cycling, the Col du Tourmalet and Alpe d’Huez, and shepherding his protege, Isaac del Toro, to third place in the final standings.

In another life, the Olympic road race champion, Remco Evenepoel, would probably have won his first Tour, and the French debutant Paul Seixas climbed on to the podium. It is their misfortune, and that of Jonas Vingegaard – who crashed out of the Tour – to race in the era of Pogacar and his impregnable UAE Emirates XRG team.

A leaner, meaner and more driven Evenepoel proved his doubters wrong, reasserting himself as a genuine contender for victory in Paris. But the Belgian knows too that Pogacar may have to retire before that happens.

The statistics tell the story of one of the most dominant performances in the modern history of the Tour. Pogacar won the race overall by almost six and a half minutes, took five stages and set record times for legendary climbs in the Pyrenees and Alps. He might have won six stages, had it not been for his decision to allow Del Toro to win on stage two.

“I did really good this Tour,” Pogacar said after Saturday’s stage to Alpe d’Huez, while acknowledging the bad luck of rivals such as Vingegaard and Florian Lipowitz, both of whom finished on the podium in Paris last year and crashed out of this year’s race. “It’s the Tour, it’s three weeks,” Pogacar said. “A lot of shit can happen.”

But his unrelenting success comes with caveats. It would be naive to celebrate a five-time Tour winner without understanding the context. There is no doubt that Pogacar is a phenomenon, but his entourage has baggage from less happy times.

His team manager, Mauro Gianetti, said: “Pogacar is so strong that no matter the team, there will be doubts concerning him.” But 24 hours before the peloton arrived in Paris, Gianetti said he was a “victim” of past scandals involving riders on his teams.

The most infamous is the Saunier Duval scandal of 2008, when the Gianetti-managed team quit the Tour after their star rider, Riccardo Riccò, tested positive for a blood-doping agent. Riccò was fired, along with his teammate Leonardo Piepoli, and sponsors withdrew funding.

“I made the mistake of taking them in my team,” Gianetti told L’Équipe. “I should have reacted differently, been clearer with the press, explained that I was a victim.”

The old anxieties around Pogacar’s entourage resurfaced after the Slovene and Vingegaard were sub

jected to night-time tests by the Independent Testing Agency before stage 15. The tests were supported by the Tour de France director, Christian Prudhomme, and the UCI. In a statement released three days after the tests the UCI described the controls as “an exceptional measure, reserved for limited and justified circumstances”.

Despite the interrupted sleep, Pogacar was accepting of the tests. “If this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean,” he said, “then I totally accept it. I commit to it.”

The ITA has reiterated to the Guardian that “no public communication is made regarding negative results” but also that “there is no date from which all tests can be considered definitively negative”.

To some extent, this leaves the achievements of Pogacar and those of Vingegaard, his longstanding rival, in limbo. Regardless, the Slovene is expected to ride next month’s Vuelta a España, in an attempt to claim the only Grand Tour he has yet to win.

Next year, the Tour looks northwards, towards a Grand Départ in Scotland. Speaking to the Guardian last week, Prudhomme described Edinburgh as “a magical city”. “Every time the Tour has visited Great Britain, it has helped the Tour de France grow,” he said. “If the Tour can help bring major cycling events back to different parts of Britain, that would be fantastic. The UK has given the Tour an enormous amount.”

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Pogi might not have the greatest numbers just yet but ability to win unopposed sets him apart

27 Jul 2026 - The Guardian

William Fotheringham

The 2026 Tour de France served up an epic battle that lasted for day after day between two protagonists of the highest calibre with different skillsets, a tale of epic breakaways, intriguing team tactics and reversals of fortune, building to a spectacular climax on the race’s toughest stage. The contest for the green jersey of points winner between Mads Pedersen and Jasper Philipsen was a classic.Only Merckx and Hinault can compare with Tadej Pogacar

Those hoping for something similar in the race for the yellow jersey of overall winner were disappointed, and rapidly. Any suspense was eliminated with 42km of stage six remaining, high above the ski village of La Mongie, when Tadej Pogacar dislodged Jonas Vingegaard and the other putative race favourites on the Col du Tourmalet. It was a familiar stinging attack, and a familiar outcome, with the Slovene opening a lead that looked insurmountable, as indeed it was. Analysing the race for the

to the RMC radio station, the former FDJ United manager Marc Madiot did not mince his words: “There was one single rider who attacked in this Tour: Tadej Pogacar. He attacked once, and everyone understood it was finished.”

Unfortunately for the neutrals, the art of cycling’s greats boils down to this: they don’t so much kill suspense as tie it up and eviscerate it before jumping up and down on its steaming remains. The neutrals have to make do with Pedersen and the green jersey, or Richard Carapaz and the polka dots.

From that moment on the Tourmalet, the chances of Pogacar joining Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin as a five-times Tour winner were nailed on, and yesterday evening, the world champion duly entered the record books. Even with the rise of Paul Seixas and Remco Evenepoel’s confirmation as a man of the Tour, few would bet against “Pogi” taking the absolute record in 2027 if he chooses to do so.

Pogacar is exceptional in many areas, but in the elite club of quintuple Tour winners he also stands out: he is younger than the other four and, unlike all those who have stood in Paris as a five-time winner of the world’s greatest bike race, there were no glitches or question marks to disrupt his serene progress to the record books. Unlike all the previous true greats, at no point in the past few weeks could Pogacar wonder if victory might slip away.

Speculation that he might have switched to black shorts in the final week to disguise stomach issues doesn’t cut it as a glitch – not compared with the broken nose that left Hinault looking like a boxer who’d had a bad night in the final week of win number five after a finish-line crash at Saint-Étienne. Or with the open wound on the crutch that dogged Merckx throughout the 1974 race, needing “constant care, bathing, the application of cream and sterile plasters, and cushioning with bits of foam and plasters”. Merckx did win eight stages in that Tour, but he was close to collapse on the mountain-top finish at Pla d’Adet and was never the same athlete again.

Similarly, although he was eventually stripped of the victory for doping, 2003 was the only Tour when Lance Armstrong did not have the race sewn up until the final time trial, while in 1995, “Big Mig” Induráin and his Banesto team had to cope with a day of crisis in the Massif Central en route to Mende. Anquetil, famously, was run close by Raymond Poulidor in 1964, and could thank his lucky stars that “PouPou” suffered a puncture in a key time trial.

In the pantheon of cycling’s greatest champions, Pogacar has long since outstripped Big Mig, physically impressive but essentially a Grand Tour specialist who shied away from one-day Classics and never won a world road race title. He is far above the calculating but charismatic Anquetil, another who never shone in the Classics, although Pogi will never have the chance to match “Master Jacques” most insanely quixotic career challenge, winning the Dauphiné Libéré stage race (now known as the Tour Auvergne - Rhone-Alps) and the Bordeaux-Paris motorpaced marathon without a day off.

When you get to Hinault, the statistical game becomes more nuanced, the debate more interesting. Pogacar has forged ahead of the “Badger” in major one-day wins – 13 Monument Classics and counting, plus two world road titles – but Hinault has won more Grand Tours, having won the Vuelta and Giro twice each, to Pogacar’s single Giro win. As for Merckx, the Slovene has won fewer Grand Tours, fewer world titles and fewer Monuments than the “Cannibal”, who also, famously and painfully, claimed the world one-hour record.

The debate over who is the greatest will continue and could well take a further twist if Pogacar rides the Vuelta and world championships later in the year, because if he starts those races, the chances are he will win both. Only when Merckx and Hinault were in their absolute prime could that be written, and that is the best reflection of where the past three weeks have put him.

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Trophy hauls of the all-time greats

Eddy Merckx

11 Grand Tours, 3 world road titles, 1 Hour Record, 19 Monument Classics

Bernard Hinault

9 Grand Tours, 1 world road title, 6 Monument Classics

Tadej Pogacar

6 Grand Tours, 2 world road titles, 13 Monument Classics