Tadej Pogacar parked his bike in the same neighborhood as Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain on Sunday — the only men who have ever won five Tours de France. He is 27 years old. He has entered seven Tours, stood on the podium seven times, and now owns five of them. “Something you wouldn’t even maybe write in a storybook,” he called it, and for once the hyperbole undersells the math.
The Slovenian sealed his third consecutive title safely in the peloton on the Champs-Élysées, finishing with a final margin of 6 minutes 26 seconds over Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel. His UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate, 22-year-old Mexican Isaac del Toro, took third — a podium spot Pogacar personally protected, sacrificing his own chances on Saturday’s queen stage to Alpe d’Huez to consolidate Del Toro’s position. That is what it looks like when a champion has enough room to play benefactor.
The final stage belonged to someone else entirely.
Mathieu van der Poel, the Dutch classics wrecking ball from Alpecin-Premier Tech, turned what is normally a ceremonial procession into a 89-kilometer cage fight. The stage had been slashed from its planned 133 kilometers because emergency services were diverted to wildfires in southwest France, which only concentrated the violence.
Van der Poel and Pogacar attacked together on the cobbled climb up Montmartre — three times up the hill, past Sacré-Cœur, through narrow lanes where fans had phones knocked from their hands as riders squeezed past at speed. They opened 15 seconds on a small chase group, 20 on the peloton. The gaps bled down slowly. With less than 400 meters remaining, Pogacar finally cracked. Van der Poel did not.
He put his head down in the final 500 meters, sprinted to victory by a bike length over his teammate Jasper Philipsen, crossed the line, and collapsed under a barrier, breathing heavily for several minutes.
“For a year I was thinking about this when I was sick last year and had to watch on television,” Van der Poel said. “It’s a dream. I thought we were going to get caught. I put my head down in the last 500 metres and went as hard as I could waiting for a wheel to come past me and it didn’t happen.”
Pogacar’s path to five was cleared in part by attrition. Jonas Vingegaard, the only rider to have broken Pogacar’s grip on this race — winning in 2022 and 2023 — abandoned on Stage 15 after breaking his collarbone on a gentle right-hand bend. The crash came after the International Testing Agency had roused Vingegaard at 2 a.m. for an anti-doping test, a rare overnight check the ITA said required “exceptional circumstances.” Pogacar himself was tested at 5 a.m. Results have not been published.
Pogacar took four stage wins in this Tour, including a record-breaking ascent of Alpe d’Huez on Stage 19. He now has 126 victories in an eight-year professional career, spanning the Tour, Giro d’Italia, Tour of Flanders, Milan-San Remo, the Road World Championships, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Some fans booed him during the race, frustrated that his dominance has flattened the competitive field. He is not slowing down. France’s 19-year-old Paul Seixas, who finished fourth and pushed Del Toro for the white jersey before fading on Saturday, may be the next challenger. He may also just be the next name Pogacar leaves behind.
Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz claimed the polka dot jersey as king of the mountains. Denmark’s Mads Pedersen took the green points jersey. And on a day when four-time Tour winner Chris Froome’s former team — now Netcompany Ineos Cycling — went winless across all 21 stages, the sport’s center of gravity settled, again, on one man who keeps making history look routine.
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