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Tadej Pogacar’s rapacious appetite for stage wins was in evidence yet again in the climbs of the Vosges, as he raced to his fourth victory of this year’s Tour de France at Le Markstein.
Pogacar’s attack came 1.6 km from the summit of the final climb, the Col de Haag, and 7.5 km from the finish line, and once again left rivals Jonas Vingegaard, Paul Seixas and Remco Evenepoel in his wake.
It was the Slovene’s 25th career stage win in the Tour. “We knew that today was one of the hardest mountain stages,” the four-time Tour champion said, “but in the end, we grabbed the opportunity.”
“We made it hard and the other guys showed fight, so big respect to all the rivals, but I couldn’t waste good legs today.”
With a week’s racing still to come, Vingegaard is now the only rider in the overall standings within five minutes of Pogacar, but despite that, he insisted that the race was far from over. “In 2023, I lost two minutes to Jonas in the time trial and the next day I lost eight minutes, so I think it’s quite obvious that anything can change in one day.”
Pogacar admitted that his mood had dipped a little towards the end of last week, but said that his partner, fellow professional rider, Urska Zigart, had called him and “given him a morale boost” on Saturday morning. “I can say for now I’m more confident. Morale is good.”
It now seems too that speculation linking the Tour leader to competing in this year’s Vuelta a España in August is well-founded. The Spanish race is the only Grand Tour the Slovene has yet to win.
The 2026 race stages its Gran Salida in Monaco and Prince Albert told the media on Friday: “Pogacar said he would be at the start, so I hope that happens.”
Asked about the comments, Pogacar said: “If the Prince said, it’s a high chance.” A win in the Vuelta would achieve a grand slam of Europe’s three Grand Tours.
As Pogacar was enjoying another victory, Tom Pidcock was suffering, paying heavily, as some had predicted, for the efforts he’d made on the previous day’s stage to Belfort.
The double Olympic champion’s podium challenge came apart on the early slopes of the Col de Haag, when Seixas’s Decathlon CMA CGM team shattered the main peloton, by setting a relentless rhythm.
Almost immediately, Pidcock lost ground and could only watch as Pogacar and Vingegaard rode on at the head of the group. In a few minutes, the British rider had tumbled from second overall, midway through the stage, to seventh overall at the finish.
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But the battle for the other podium positions is intensifying. Seixas, a discreet presence since the opening weekend in Montjuic, matched Vingegaard on the rolling descent to the finish line, before dropping the double Tour winner on the sprint to the finish and taking the lead in the young rider’s classification.
Seixas is now fourth overall and just 15 seconds away from third place, currently held by Evenepoel. His sports director, Luke Rowe, the former Team Sky road captain who is now working for the French rider’s Decathlon team, struck a pragmatic note.
“It’s nice to be optimistic, but sometimes you have to be realistic,” Rowe said. “The realistic situation is that there is one guy substantially better than the rest of the GC [general classification] leaders and the rest of the peloton.”
Rowe, who started 10 Grand Tours, has been mentoring Seixas as the 19-year-old adjusts to the demands of three weeks of racing. One of the steepest learning curves has been reining in the breakneck descending style that led to the French rider’s high-speed crash in June.
Rowe described Seixas as “a 19-year-old kid, who was descending very fast for the first half of the year”, and added that, during the Tour, Seixas had been “a little bit more cautious”.
“If you’re racing GC, then a lot of the days it’s about getting from A to B, being patient and conservative, which some people think is boring,” he said, “but that’s what it takes to be on the podium in the Tour.”
