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”.
Pogacar’s rivals need to build a team that can take the race to him on a daily basis in a bid to crack him. Photograph: Shutterstock
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.
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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.
