Tour worries emerge for Pogacar after illness sweeps through tea

Carapaz roars clear to win stage 18 as UAE Team Emirates XRG riders struggle

24 Jul 2026 - The Guardian

Jeremy Whittle

Richard Carapaz won stage 18 of the Tour de France after a breakaway group of six riders duelled their way to the winter sports station at Orcières Merlette, but uncertainty surrounds the health of race leader Tadej Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates-XRG, which has been swept by a virus since Monday’s rest day.

After Adam Yates’s stage-long calvary on the road to Voiron, Pogačar’s team was further weakened by the abandonment of his American colleague, Brandon McNulty, who quit the Tour with 21km of yesterday’s stage remaining.

Two more of Pogacar’s teammates, Tim Wellens and Florian Vermeersch, also appeared to struggle at times during the stage, which included five categorised climbs, including the final seven-kilometre ascent to the finish.

Speaking at the stage start in Voiron, Wellens suggested other riders within the team were unwell and revealed that he had a sore throat. Seen through the lens of today and tomorrow’s mountain-top finishes on Alpe d’Huez, Pogačar, despite his 4m 32s lead over second-placed Remco Evenepoel, has reason to be worried.

“I’m sad that Brandon could not finish. We will see in the next two days but Adam is getting better, and tomorrow, we will go with the flow,” Pogačar said. “I think we can manage. It’s the third week, all the teams are suffering. There are bodies everywhere on a stage like today. We will keep fighting and I believe we can do it.”

The full extent of any illness within UAE Team Emirates-XRG was further speculated on by Pogacar’s decision to swap his usual yellow shorts for black. McNulty’s decision to stop may have been for other reasons too, though. He had also been nursing injuries sustained when he was hit by a car during his reconnaissance of Tuesday’s time trial.

The former Giro d’Italia champion Carapaz, who won a mountain stage at nearby Superdévoluy in 2024, narrowly avoided colliding with an errant fan earlier in the stage. The Ecuadorian recovered from that mid-race scare to win with a typically gutsy lone attack.

On a stage in which the main favourites called a truce, those who had tried and failed to succeed from breakaways earlier in the race made one last-ditch bid for glory. That included the Geraint Thomasdirected Netcompany Ineos, which has yet to win a stage this year despite numerous attempts.

Time is now running out and Thomas has described this Tour as “tough going” for the British team. So it proved once more, with Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman trying but failing to join the decisive move. The group that finally formed included Carapaz, but also Matteo Jorgenson, teammate to the now absent Jonas Vingegaard at Visma Lease-a-bike, and Mauro Schmid, already a stage winner for Jayco AlUla in Belfort.

Carapaz has proven a very reliable performer in the Tour’s mid-mountain stages, however, and once again he had enough power to distance his rivals in the final kilometres. The EF

Education-EasyPost rider finished 45 seconds clear of both Schmid and Jorgenson. All eyes are now on this weekend’s double-headed suffer-fest on the daunting Alpe d’Huez, with a worried Pogacar looking, for the first time this year, almost vulnerable.

Today Stage 19 Gap Alpe d’Huez 127.9km, mountain stage 

TV Live TNT Sports 1, 1.15pm 

Highlights Channel 5, 7pm

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‘No bias in testing’

Prudhomme hits out

24 Jul 2026 - The Guardian

Jeremy Whittle

Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France, has rejected accusations of bias towards French riders and launched a staunch defence of last Sunday’s night-time “exceptional” drug tests.

Speaking at the start of stage 18, Prudhomme insisted that the International Testing Agency’s (ITA) practices did not favour any riders. “We fought to have an independent agency, and now we have one,” he told the Guardian. “I have no desire to interfere with their work. Not only am I not informed, I must not be informed.”

Prudhomme’s comments come in the wake of Matej Mohorič, who rides for Bahrain Victorious, appearing to imply that Paul Seixas, the 19-year-old home hope in France, had been given preferential treatment by the ITA, saying in an interview on Tuesday that “it would be good to guarantee equal treatment for everyone”.

“After all,” Mohoric said, “we know that this French rider [Seixas], who is well placed in the general classification, didn’t undergo that [night-time] test.”

The ITA stressed its independence from French anti-doping authorities and Prudhomme underlined the significance for such autonomy. “The UCI has ensured that there is now an independent agency [ITA],” Prudhomme said. “I find out about testing at exactly the same time as you do – or often even after you do. I’m not informed beforehand, and nor should I be.”

The race leader, Tadej Pogačar, and rival Jonas Vingegaard, who has since abandoned the Tour, were tested at 5am and 2am respectively last Sunday morning. The tests have been described by the UCI as an “exceptional measure, reserved for limited and justified circumstances”. “The ITA is doing the job it’s paid to do,” Prudhomme said.