17 hours ago
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180 km to go: Quentin Pacher sets off, and fancies a home breakaway. He will soon have company as the peloton snakes into le campagne, the roads slowly narrowing as they exit the boulevards. A downhill pulls Pacher back into the pack who are flying along.
Off we go in Pau!
They idle out of the mountain city, a beautiful place, trees full of green, refreshed by the summer rain. Bryan Coquard is not among them, his broken finger ruling him out. He was struggling to brake. Christian Prudhomme gets them launched and off go the attempted escapees.
We approach the départ réel, the reality of a heavy day in the saddle dawns. Here we go!
In Pau, the rain is coming down but that’s cooled the temperature down to 19 degrees.
In summary, Pogacar rules the waves, and the hills, and almost the flat, too.
Eddy Merckx is the only cyclist to have won all three individual classifications in a single Tour de France. He achieved this in 1969, winning yellow, green and polka dot jersey. That’s the only time that’s been done on a Grand Tour.
Top five points leaders
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1. Jonathan Milan (ITA) Lidl - Trek 231
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2. Tadej Pogacar (SLO) UAE Team Emirates - XRG 203
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3. Mathieu van der Poel (NED) Alpecin - Deceuninck 173
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4. Biniam Girmay (ERI) Intermarché - Wanty 154
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5. Tim Merlier (BEL) Soudal Quick-Step 150
King of the Mountains top five
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1. Tadej Pogacar (SLO) UAE Team Emirates - XRG 37
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2. Lenny Martinez (FRA) Bahrain Victorious 27
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3. Jonas Vingegaard (DEN) Team Visma - Lease a Bike “
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4. Michael Woods (CAN) Israel - Premier Tech 22
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5. Ben Healy (IRL) EF Education - EasyPost 16
Here’s the Top 10 GC
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1. Tadej Pogacar (SLO) UAE Team Emirates - XRG 45:45:51
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2. Jonas Vingegaard (DEN) Team Visma - Lease a Bike +4:07
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3. Remco Evenepoel (BEL) Soudal Quick-Step +7:24
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4. Florian Lipowitz (GER) Red Bull - BORA - +7:30
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5. Oscar Onley (GBR) Team Picnic PostNL +8:11
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6. Kévin Vauquelin (FRA) Arkéa - B&B Hotels +8:15
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7. Primoz Roglic (SLO) Red Bull - BORA - +8:50
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8. Tobias Johannessen (NOR) Uno-X Mobility +10:36
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9. Felix Gall (AUT) Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale +11:43
Team -
10. Matteo Jorgenson (USA) Team Visma - Lease a Bike +14:15
Here’s the official Tour de France map of today’s stage 14.
Some Col du Tourmalet data via Strava:
Key details
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Distance: 18.83 km
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Elevation Gain: +1,398 m
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Average Gradient: 7.65%
KOM (fastest time)
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Belongs to Thibault Pinot at 51:13 min.
This was set on 20th July 2019, and you can view the activity here.
Pro v amateur comparison
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It takes an average amateur 1 hour and 51 minutes to complete this segment, while the average pro takes around 1 hour and 8 minutes.
Jeremy Whittle on Friday’s time-trial triumph.
The second time trial in the 2025 Tour was expected to further confirm Pogacar’s supremacy over the peloton and so it proved, as the defending champion extended his lead to over four minutes with his fourth stage win in this year’s race and the 21st Tour stage of his career.
Riding a standard road bike instead of a time trial setup, he was the fastest at every time check on the 10.9km climb, in many ways a carbon copy of Thursday’s ascent to Hautacam, where he also triumphed.
Preamble
Le Tour is Pogacar’s. That much we know, as Tadej, as his good lady wife calls him, has been devastating as soon as the race reached the mountains, previous rivals unable to live with him. This, let us recall, is a rider who has also competed for the Classics all year; this isn’t supposed to happen in the modern age. Though Pogacar is rewriting history and collecting stages at a rate that must have Mark Cavendish twitching. The gap is over four minutes, just a crack on a mountain pass away but can Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel rely on that?
Today, the middle Saturday, is another journey into the heart of the Pyrenees. Time for a breakaway? The truth is nobody is strong enough to break away from Pogacar. And as he said himself: “it’s the Tour, you cannot just back off if there’s the opportunity for a stage win. You never know when it’s your last day on the Tour.”
William Fotheringham’s verdict is thus:
A mountain classic: Cols de Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde, plus the pull up to the ski station, where winners include Federico Bahamontes, Greg LeMond, Hinault and Robert Millar, now known as Philippa York. Four big passes make this a decisive day in the mountains prize with a ton of points on offer; the stage winner will probably be a climber who’s not figuring overall. Enric Mas of Spain might fit that bill, or the Austrian Felix Gall.
