5 hours ago
16
Tadej Pogacar took a record-equalling fifth win in the Tour de France on Sunday, 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.
after newsletter promotion
“You never know what your children do in their rooms, and you certainly don’t know what the riders do at home. Before signing Riccò, I asked him to go to the UCI [the sport’s governing body] to be tested. The UCI then sent me a document stating that he did indeed have a naturally occurring hematocrit level above 50%. I feel like a victim of this.”
The old anxieties around Pogacar’s entourage resurfaced after the Slovene and Vingegaard were subjected 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, which were authorised by a Paris judge, 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 August’s Vuelta a España, in an attempt to claim the only Grand Tour title he has yet to win. Right now, the 27-year-old is at the peak of his powers and few would bet against him completing a Grand Tour grand slam.
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.”
