One of the hardest, if not the hardest, Tours I've been in, says Pogacar
The defending champion leads Jonas Vingegaard by 4:24 in the general classification heading into Stage 21, which will feature a spectacular finale with three climbs of the Butte Montmartre in the French capital — a twist on the traditional Champs-Elysees parade.
'Every year we say it's the hardest Tour ever, but I know that this year's Tour was something on another level,' Pogacar told reporters after finishing Saturday's 20th stage in the main bunch.
'Maybe one day we went a bit easier, but if you look at the power files throughout the whole Tour, it's been really amazing and tough. Even today we almost went all out from start to finish.'
The 26-year-old, who previously won the race in 2020, 2021 and last year, said the gruelling route had tested the peloton to its limits.
'I must say that even though it was the hardest, one of the hardest Tours I ever did, I enjoyed it and had good shape and good legs. Really looking forward to the last day tomorrow,' Pogacar, who has won 10 stages in the last two Tours, added.
After crossing the line on the penultimate stage, Pogacar, who on Friday said he was counting down the kilometres to Paris, hinted at a quick return to his bike despite three punishing weeks on the road.
"Monday, I travel home, Tuesday maybe I go on the bike. You never know — if I feel good, I do a bit of riding, stop for coffee and enjoy summer at home," he said with a smile.
Asked about a possible appearance at the Vuelta a Espana later this year, which could further cement his place among cycling's greatest in case of victory, Pogacar remained non-committal.
"We will decide a couple of days after the Tour, after everything is calm. Then we can make decisions for the next races," he said.
"I think it's going to be tough to decide. Of course, I would like to go to the Vuelta. Every year I do the Tour and I would like to do the Vuelta one day also, yeah, we will see."
World champion Pogacar has won the Tour three times, achieved a rare Giro-Tour double last year, and has already claimed victory in three of the five Monuments - the most prestigious one-day races - prompting comparisons with Belgian all-time great Eddy Merckx.
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The defining image of this Tour de France may not be a rainbow-clad Tadej Pogacar celebrating his 100th career victory; nor Pogacar letting fly with 12km to go on Hautacam and storming up the mountain in yellow; nor Pogacar grinning as he essentially broke his rivals in the Pyrenean time trial. Instead, the defining moment of this year's Tour may be the waiting game he played on the road up Mont Ventoux. Climbing the legendary lunar landscape, pedalling smoothly, but hanging back. Up ahead, it was local boy Valentin Paret-Peintre who took a career-defining victory, raising his arms aloft, Ben Healy shaking his head in defeat in the background. (For the French, that is probably the defining moment.) Further down the mountain, Pogacar continued to pedal. He did not reel in the day's plucky breakaway, chasing down every moment of glory for himself, as many teams – and many observers – may have feared. Instead, he watched. Waited. And in the closing moments, he broke free of Jonas Vingegaard, his only, very remote challenger for yellow, and floated across the line alone. This Tour de France has seen a newer, more complete version of Tadej Pogacar, the 2.0 model of the world's best bike rider. Refined, given a few tweaks and upgrades. It has made him a more terrifying prospect than ever. Pogacar now has four Tour de France titles, each won in a different style. The first, in 2020, was almost a surprise, having shadowed Primoz Roglic for the whole race before seizing the crown in the final time trial. His second title, the following year, was a show of strength: he led from day eight and won three stages, including two summit finishes. Then followed two years of humiliation at the hands of Vingegaard. In 2022 he won three stages to the Dane's two; it wasn't enough. In 2023 he was on the back foot from the start, nursing a wrist fracture from Liege-Bastogne-Liege, but attacked the race with the same exuberance as if he had been box-fresh. It proved his downfall, as Vingegaard utilised his team strength and canny, calculating racer's mind to overwhelm Pogacar, letting him exhaust himself with attacks before quietly, mercilessly, turning the screw. 2024 was back to normal for Pogacar: his third overall win was a display of total domination, hoovering up six stage wins in the process. But the lessons from his two years of abject defeat no doubt stayed in his mind. They have contributed to his newer, sharper, all-conquering form. Now he is not just the world's best bike rider: he is the world's best racer. His dominance this year is unprecedented in the modern era. Only 12 riders have finished within one hour of the yellow jersey. That hasn't happened since 1969, when Eddy Merckx won his first Tour. Evidently, Pogacar still loves to win: UAE Team Emirates-XRG orchestrated Tim Wellens taking custody of the king of the mountains jersey ahead of stage four, just so the Slovenian could take his 100th career win in the world champion's rainbow stripes, rather than polka dots. He picked up two wins on the Classics-style punchy terrain of the first week, both times against his biggest rivals: Mathieu van der Poel and Vingegaard. It was clearly important to him that he not just stamp his authority on the race on Hautacam, but to take victory on one of the Tour's most infamous summits too. But whereas previous incarnations of Pogacar would simply have kept winning, from then on, the 26-year-old held something back. On Mont Ventoux he was content to match Vingegaard's attacks, withstanding the temptation to put his rival in his place, and only accelerated at the very summit. It seems unlikely this was driven by any sympathy for his fellow riders; he said during this Tour that he isn't here to make friends. He did the same on Col de la Loze, making his point with a vicious kick inside the final few hundred metres, rather than attacking from the foot of the climb. Perhaps part of that is because he views the Courchevel side of the climb as beneath him: 'This side of the Col de la Loze is much easier, but the other side I want to return [to] for a victory.' But he also said, 'I wanted the win, but [defending] the yellow jersey is a priority.' He backed that up on stage 20: UAE rode as if they wanted to win it, but he did not chase down Thymen Arensman in the final kilometres, allowing himself to be towed along by Florian Lipowitz as the German rode for his own GC ambitions. He has spared energy, riding conservatively and defensively, racing within his means. In short, he has raced in the same manner Vingegaard did when he schooled his rival in the 2022 and 2023 Tours. One of the most fascinating developments of this year's Tour has been seeing just how much the world's two best riders have taken from each other, as they both aim to plug the holes in their armour. It was noticeable in the first week how much better Vingegaard has become on punchy climbs, the sort of terrain where he has never previously been able to match Pogacar's unparalleled explosive kick. And over the last couple of seasons, Pogacar has made himself sharper at high altitude, on the hour-long, brutal Alpine climbs where Vingegaard has always felt most comfortable. Vingegaard demolished Pogacar in 2023's climbing time trial, from Passy to Combloux; Pogacar turned the tables this year. Every adaptation has served both riders well – but it has also highlighted how unbridgeable the gulf was for Vingegaard this year. The pair are, in theory, closer than ever, with neither carrying injuries and both in their physical prime. Vingegaard certainly looked closer to Pogacar in the Alps than the Pyrenees, but he hasn't gained any time on the Slovenian, barring bonus seconds, in the last two Tours. His only time gain on this Tour was two seconds on the line on stage 19. So Pogacar celebrates a fourth victory, and can finally go back to doing 'nice stuff with his life'. Where next for the modern-day Cannibal? He has won nearly everything there is to win; he has got Vingegaard's number. But he has also cut a jaded figure: it does not feel merely coincidental that Pogacar has seemed fed up throughout much of this Tour, especially since he began to ride in defence of yellow. 'This is the point where I ask myself: 'Why am I still here?' It's so long these three weeks,' he said after the queen stage. The idea of the Tour without the world's best rider seems inconceivable; UAE are hardly likely to let their star skip it. But what does the future look like for Pogacar? Will he go back to his marauding, stage-hunting pomp, hunting down Mark Cavendish's record 35? Will he target ever more outlandish milestones – maybe the unprecedented Giro-Tour-Vuelta treble? He has drawn level with Chris Froome on four Tour de France victories: could he go one clear of the current record of five, shared by Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Jacques Anquetil? For the peloton, Pogacar 2.0 may be a more merciful figure, refraining from winning everything in sight in search of greater goals. But he is ever more powerful – and the only question remaining is, how far will he go?
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Fourth Tour wins are, I once wrote, 'more for the record books than the heart … the penultimate step to cycling greatness, [they] often do little to warm the soul at the time'. The past three weeks suggests that nothing has changed. It's far from the four stages of grief, but you could argue that a first Tour victory is met with surprise and delight, a second admiration, the third respect, the fourth resignation. As Tadej Pogacar's fourth Tour win approached with the inevitability of a steamroller this week the chief cycling writer at l'Equipe, Alex Roos, grumbled about the Slovene's lack of joie de vivre. 'For the last few days, his sulks, his grumbles, his bad mood have blurred and eaten away at the ambience of the end of this Tour, because how can you get enthusiastic if the Yellow Jersey himself gives the impression of being bored and going through something painful …?' Pogacar's fourth Tour win was inevitable – with the usual 'barring this or that' proviso – from the moment 19 days ago when the first time check during the time trial around Caen gave him an unbridgeable advantage over Jonas Vingegaard. Similarly, the fourth wins for Bernard Hinault, Miguel Induráin, Lance Armstrong and Chris Froome were all telegraphed by the end of week one: nonetheless admirable as athletic achievements – Armstrong's excepted – but zero suspense. Hence the feeling of resignation. Pogacar could be forgiven if he seemed slightly underwhelmed with proceedings this week. This has been a particularly intense, brutal and attritional Tour, with barely any respite, and the stage to Pontarlier on Saturday summed this up perfectly: a two-wheeled equivalent of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Pogacar may be physically on top of things, with an unbridgeable margin over Vingegaard, but there was still plenty of potential for the unforeseen, plenty to get stressed about. The bulk of the stages of this 2025 Tour were as intense as Saturday's but that has not happened by chance; it is the culmination of a process that began in 2007, when the race director, Christian Prudhomme, set out on a mission to sex up the race for television. Since then, the men who devise the route have gone out of their way to avoid the lengthy, flat, formulaic stages that once were the hallmark of the early phase of the race, and many of the 'stages of transition'; these were accepted by Tour watchers, in the words of the late Geoffrey Nicholson, 'with the stoicism of a Headingley crowd watching the slow construction of an opening stand'. The days when a sprinter such as Mario Cipollini could take four successive stages (1999) are long gone. Now, thanks to Prudhomme's routefinder‑general Thierry Gouvenou, visiting innocuous places such as Rouen, Toulouse or Carcassonne entails daunting climbs and descents that make for compelling TV viewing. Again to encourage the attackers, stages over 200km are now the exception while time bonuses at all the finishes encourage potential winners to contest every stage they can. Every day on the Tour, it seems, now has the intensity and unpredictability of a one-day Classic in miniature; every day is massively compelling to watch. Since leaving Lille on 5 July, the Tour men have enjoyed one stage which followed the pattern of the past: day eight to Laval. The 'American quarter-hour' – the term given to the margin Armstrong's US Postal team would give each day's breakaway – has been consigned to history. This year, not even the final promenade into Paris is sacred, but a mini-Classic in its final kilometres. If Pogacar is finding the intensity of the race a bit much, then we should savour the irony; if ever there was a bike racer suited for the current made-for-TV Tour, he is that one. It's no coincidence that he has won the Tour of Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and shone in Paris-Roubaix since taking his first Tour in 2020: the intensity; the bike-handling skill; the need to hold position in the peloton and the repeated maximal efforts demanded by the spring one‑day Classics are now the perfect preparation for La Grande Boucle. Hence the emergence of other current stars: Mathieu van der Poel, Ben Healy, Wout van Aert, and 'punchy' riders such as Kévin Vauquelin. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion The new-look Tour favours the complete bike racer, just as the Tours of the Induráin years were built for a time trialist. Vingegaard struggles to hang on to Pogacar in the Tour's punchy stages, and that's not a surprise: the Dane is not a Classic rider in the same register as Pogacar – the last time he was seen in a spring Classic was 2022, when he failed to finish Flèche Wallonne or Liège-Bastogne-Liège. In fact, you could argue that Vingegaard is doing shockingly well to hold Pogacar, given his obvious comfort zone is the high mountains. The new-look Tour offers far more openings than Tours of the past, which presents opportunities that were not there in the Froome or Induráin years: however, if you want to beat the reigning champion, you have to out-Pogi Pogi: build a team that can take the race to the Slovene on a daily basis and eventually crack him. In the real world, however, Vingegaard's Visma tried to do just that in the past three weeks, and self-destructed in the process. As a result, Pogacar's rivals face the same conundrum of those of Hinault, Induráin, Armstrong and Froome: how to defeat a champion on top of his game, who has mastered the challenges the organisers have thrown at him and is supported by a team that has grown in confidence and experience each year? You can tweak the Tour all you will, but some things never change.
