Pogacar defeats the Tour de France itself with Tourmalet procession

“Nothing can be compared to anything else, and there will only ever be one Eddy Merckx in the history of cycling.” So wrote Tour de France director Jacques Goddet in L’Équipe in 1969, the day after Merckx had attacked over the top of the Tourmalet and then soloed 140km to Mourenx, placing a final exclamation mark on a Tour he had already dominated at full volume.

Goddet was right, of course. There will only ever be one Eddy Merckx and the tedious, social media-era tendency to turn every race into a referendum on the GOAT will never change that. Merckx defined and dominated his era just as Tadej Pogačar is defining and dominating his. Each man raced in a different stratosphere to his contemporaries. No real need to split hairs. 

But the Tour’s traversal of familiar roads means that comparisons are sometimes hard to avoid. Merckx’s day of days on the road to Mourenx came after he had climbed the Col d’Aspin and then sprinted for the mountains points atop the Tourmalet, and the Tour was back in that familiar corner of the Pyrenees on Thursday afternoon.

At its heart, the Tour is a palimpsest, where the winners of today superimpose their own text over what has been written by those who came this way before them. On Thursday’s run over the Aspin and the Tourmalet, Pogačar and his UAE Team Emirates-XRG team were always likely to dictate the narrative, and that’s exactly how it turned out. 

UAE set a supersonic tempo on the Tourmalet, so much so that Pogačar and teammate Isaac del Toro opened a gap on the rest with 5km still to climb. Pogačar pressed on alone shortly afterwards. Jonas Vingegaard – who else? – gamely kept the gap at 10 seconds for a couple of kilometres, but he would be half a minute down by the summit and his deficit would mushroom over the 38km that followed. 

The bikes, the nutrition, the training and the tactics are all very different to 1969, but the dominance is very much in the same vein. Like Merckx, Pogačar wasn’t really racing to win the stage here or even to win the Tour itself; he seemed to be racing to put the very idea of challenging him again beyond the wildest imaginations of his competitors. 

And Pogačar probably succeeded, too, despite Vingegaard’s dutifully defiant words after he reached the finish at Gavarnie-Gèdre some 2:38 down on his old rival. “I still believe in myself. I still believe my legs will get better throughout the race, so the fight is not over,” Vingegaard said.

What else could he say? Knowing Vingegaard, the fight isn’t over because the Dane has always been maniacal in his preparation and metronomic in his performances. But like on the first major rendezvous at Hautacam last year, the direction of travel is clear, and Vingegaard can surely sense it. 

As if to make certain, Pogačar made a point of waiting for Vingegaard instead of heading directly to the podium ceremony, patting him on the back as he drifted through the finish area. Vingegaard looked impassively ahead. The fight might not be over, but he must know the race for yellow almost certainly is.

Pogačar’s superiority here was such that it feels completely futile to pick holes in the tactics of his rivals. Any strategy was destined to fail against a force as irresistible as this. We’ve seen this movie before. Nothing to be done.

Visma | Lease a Bike seemed keen on getting Victor Campenaerts up the road early as a satellite rider for Vingegaard, but the plan backfired when the Belgian only had two riders for company and the move was swept up long before they hit the mountains. 

An attack from Matteo Jorgenson on the Côte de Loucrup briefly sent frissons through the GC group but it petered out soon afterwards, and the American paid a price for that effort by the time the race hit the Tourmalet. 

UAE had already begun their forcing on the Col d’Aspin, and by the foot of the Tourmalet, it was clear that Vingegaard would be resisting an attack rather than launching one. The television broadcast relayed sports director Marc Reef’s final words of encouragement to Vingegaard as the climb began. “You have to trust in yourself, Jonas,” Reef urged. “You’re really good. You’re really good.”

He is, and his crushing Giro d’Italia victory confirmed as much. The problem is that Pogačar is simply much better, and the gulf now appears to be widening. To compound matters, Pogačar is supported by a murderers’ row of climbing talent, and they squeezed the life out of the race, much like Lance Armstrong’s US Postal squad did on the very same stretch of road en route to La Mongie in 2004, shelling GC men out the back long before their leader hit the front.

Visma may have had UAE’s number in the team time trial in Barcelona on Saturday, but the favour was returned on the Tourmalet. Tim Wellens set the tempo for the first 5km before handing off to Felix Grossschartner, who covered the next 3.5km. That was the cue for Brandon McNulty, who covered 3km before handing off to Adam Yates. The Briton upped the ante for barely a kilometre, but that was all he really needed to do. 

When Yates swung off, Del Toro and Pogačar pressed clear. Pogačar stayed in the company of his young teammate for 400m or so before soaring away alone, while the best cyclists in the world were scattered across the mountainside behind them, desperately scrambling to limit the damage.

In 1969, Goddet wondered if Merckx had sought to “humiliate these other riders by crushing them” before concluding that the Belgian was simply hardwired to spare no effort. For Merckx, Goddet reckoned, easing up would have been tantamount to “hypocrisy.”

In 2026, UAE manager Mauro Gianetti maintained that Pogačar’s Tourmalet attack was born of necessity, as the terrain simply wasn’t demanding enough on the long category 2 haul to the finish at Gavarnie-Gèdre. Had he waited for the final climb, Pogačar risked being caught up in a game of tactics and shadow boxing. 

And so, like at Strade Bianche and the last two World Championships, Pogačar removed any pesky variables from his path by bludgeoning his way clear from distance. 

From there, it was a familiar procession. Pogačar’s 30-second lead on Vingegaard at the summit more than doubled over the other side, and he continued to run up the score on the shallow ascent to the finish, pedalling with disarming ease as he cruised back into the yellow and towards the 23rd Tour stage win of his career.

In the overall standings, Pogačar is now 2:42 clear of Vingegaard, with Del Toro third at 3:27. Remco Evenepoel, fourth at 3:30, already seems resigned to contesting the internal hierarchy at Red Bull rather than fighting for the yellow jersey. 

Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM) underscored his potential with a courageous display that leaves him sixth at 3:55, but he also demonstrated the limits of his 19 years. He might one day be the man to end Pogačar’s era of dominance, but that day is not going to come this July.

The long list of those defeated here includes the Tour itself. When ASO unveiled the backloaded route last October, they trumpeted it as a race “in crescendo.” After Pogačar put the race to bed early in 2024 and 2025, the course seemed to be designed to engineer a situation where the suspense might endure until the back-to-back finishes at Alpe d’Huez in the final week.

There are still more than two weeks to go to Paris, of course, but the road ahead looks alarmingly straightforward for Pogačar, and that will worry ASO. Goddet’s final word on Merckx in Mourenx comes to mind: “It is no longer true to say that the Tour is only ever won in Paris. Eddy Merckx has shattered that myth.”

Goddet was writing with just five days of that Tour remaining, incidentally. This Tour is still long. For everyone bar Pogačar, that’s the problem.