Pogacar rewards Del Toro's loyalty to underline his own Tour dominance

The irony here is that Pogačar’s help wasn’t really required, at least not at that late juncture when Del Toro was already assured of a podium finish. The spate of illness in the UAE Team Emirates-XRG camp meant that Pogačar and Del Toro had been without teammates from the top of the Col du Galibier, where the yellow jersey took it upon himself to set the tempo in pursuit of a break that included dangerman Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek). The Spaniard, incidentally, had left UAE in fractious circumstances last year.

The real threat to Del Toro’s podium and white jersey, however, was Paul Seixas, and Decathlon CMA CGM tried to break the Mexican with a show of force on the Col de Sarenne. That backfired, however, when the debutant Seixas was dropped after finally showing the understandable limitations of his 19 years in a race of this length and difficulty.

By the summit of the Sarenne, Del Toro had clearly won his duel with Seixas, and as the yellow jersey group took on the ridge that led towards the final 3km of Alpe d’Huez, another stage victory was just about within Pogačar’s range. 

But rather than hunt it down, as he did so remorselessly the previous afternoon when the Tour tackled the Alpe via the classic Bourg d’Oisans approach, Pogačar opted to stay in gregario mode for the remainder of the day.

Even when Remco Evenepoel, a game second on GC, accelerated on the final approach to Alpe d’Huez, Pogačar resisted the temptation to shut him down. It helped, of course, that he was already held a buffer of more than seven minutes on Evenepoel in the overall standings, but by this point, Seixas was labouring almost two minutes down the road. If Del Toro couldn’t navigate his way to the white jersey from here, then maybe he didn’t deserve it.

Pogačar, however, didn’t see it that way. He stayed with Del Toro all the way to Alpe d’Huez, and when the UAE pair crossed the line, he joined his teammate in celebrating with his trademark ‘bull horn’ salute.

“It was an honour to ride for Isaac during that last hour and a half," Pogačar said afterwards. “I did it with pleasure, and now I realise just how hard it is to work for someone else. Being able to cross the finish line together on Alpe d'Huez is memorable.”

Pogačar couched his decision to ride for Del Toro as repayment for all the work the Mexican had done for him over the three weeks. The reality, however, is that circumstances meant Del Toro was of relatively limited help to Pogačar. Del Toro’s high position in GC meant that he was rarely sacrificed to lead out Pogačar for his stage-winning accelerations, and he spent most of the three weeks as one of two protected riders at UAE.

No, more than a reward for Del Toro’s work, this had the feel of a recognition for his loyalty. Although Del Toro had arrived for his Tour debut on the back of overall victories at the UAE Tour, Tirreno-Adriatico and the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, he never once dared to suggest he might share leadership with Pogačar in July.

And throughout the race, Del Toro was always very clear about his place in the hierarchy. He provided a sparkling lead-out for Pogačar when he won at Les Angles on stage 3 and he was on the scene when his leader made his Tour-defining attack on the Col du Tourmalet. But over the course of three weeks, every other rider on the team spent considerably more time on the front of the peloton in Pogačar’s active service. 

“We clicked quite quickly when he came to the team. We had good energy around each other, good relationship, good humour. Then we did some races together, he was always there for me 100%,” Pogačar said afterwards, and it was hard not to detect a tacit admonishment of the departed Ayuso. The Spaniard was apparently reluctant to put his shoulder to the wheel for Pogačar when he rode the 2024 Tour, and he left UAE last autumn after struggling to find his place in a team built around the world champion.

Pogačar’s harmonious rapport with Del Toro appears to be entirely genuine, but the very public displays of esteem for his teammate here also served as a message. The capo of UAE values his teammates’ loyalty as well as their labour.

The very fact that Pogačar could spend the most demanding stage of the Tour riding as a super domestique and, in the finale, even riding within himself, was also a message to the rest of the peloton, just like his gift to Del Toro on stage 2.

In L’Équipe’s view, Pogačar’s actions in Del Toro were “a form of irreverence” to the Tour itself, with the newspaper claiming that the Slovenian had sought to “showcase his dominance and humiliate Jonas Vingegaard and all his rivals.”

Irreverent or not, Pogačar’s dominance was simply the brutal reality of this Tour, where his superiority was never in the slightest doubt at any point. He had already amassed a winning lead by stage 6, when he shredded Vingegaard and all others on the Tourmalet, and he ran up the score at Le Lioran and Le Markstein.

When Vingegaard abandoned with a broken collarbone on stage 15, there wasn’t even token resistance to Pogačar’s overwhelming strength. When Pogačar accelerated at the foot of Alpe d’Huez on stage 19 en route to smashing Marco Pantani’s record, nobody in the yellow jersey group even considered following. Pogačar breezed away from them as though he were the special guest at a sportive.

Evenepoel, riding the best Grand Tour of his career from a purely athletic standpoint, was clear after his stage win at Plateau de Solaison that he was racing for second place. At Alpe d’Huez on Saturday, he was even more frank when asked what it would take for him to go a step further and win the Tour: “Pogi not starting.”

And that is the underlying question as the Tour travels north to Paris on Saturday evening ahead of Pogačar’s fifth coronation: how many more times does he want to win the Tour? 

Despite what podcaster and zero-times Tour winner Lance Armstrong claimed last week, Pogačar has now equalled the record held by Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin.

It would be a surprise if Pogačar didn’t aim for the outright record of six next year, but in the past, he has also expressed a certain jadedness with the business of riding and winning the biggest race of them all.

This time around, Pogačar didn’t betray any of the outright antipathy towards the Tour that surfaced during the final week in 2025, but that doesn’t mean that he will want to maintain July as the central axis of his cycling life for the rest of his career.

But in any case, at the Tour, at the Classics and at every race on the calendar, Pogačar has been in a league of his own since the start of 2024. That season, which yielded the Triple Crown of Giro, Tour and Worlds, was hailed at the time as a career year, but now it just looks like the new normal for a rider completely without peer. 

“I must say that this year I felt that I wasn’t getting much stronger,” he said on Saturday evening. “Since 2024, I would say the numbers are there, but you get more experience, you deal with things differently, you have just small things that are improving. Maybe the numbers are like the same in the last two years, but it’s the details that sometimes count and the mood and emotions and all. I think this is where I’m improving a lot and taking experiences.”

Improving or not, Pogačar is still only 27. There appears to be no end in sight and gifts remain an exception rather than the rule.