Next milestone
Tour favorite Pogacar celebrates anniversary victory
08.07.2025 – 11:48 p.m.Reading time: 2 min.
Tadej Pogacar is one of the best cycling professionals. He cracked an impressive brand on the fourth stage of the tour.
Tadej Pogacar showed the fans in Rouen a wide grin, waved the rainbow jersey and also grabbed the mountain jersey after his stage victory – but the Slovenian star had to step off the podium for the award ceremony without the yellow jersey. He crowned his 100th professional victory with a strong appearance on the 112nd Tour de France, but he missed the overall lead by seconds.
“I would have been happy about yellow, that was also the goal today – but my rainbow jersey is also nice,” said Pogacar. He could still be satisfied: in the fight for the tour victory, he took off time to his main competitor Jonas Vingegaard – if only six seconds.
On the stage over 174.2 kilometers through Normandy, Pogacar narrowly prevailed against Mathieu van der Poel. He turned the duel on Sunday when the Dutch was still ahead. Both drivers are now at the same time, but van der Poel will probably only wear the yellow jersey until Wednesday: Then the first individual time trial is on the program.
The day was disappointing for the German Red Bull team. Captain Primoz Roglic lost 32 seconds to Pogacar, Florian Lipowitz finished 54 seconds behind. Lipowitz said after the stage: “Actually, I didn’t feel that bad, but my legs just missed it.” Emanuel Buchmann also lost time and fell back in the classification.
Pogacar is now eight seconds ahead of Vingegaard. On Wednesday, the 33 km long time trial around Caen is pending – there will be shown for the first time how strong the favorites are in direct comparison. Zeitfahr world champion Remco Evenepoel is the favorite. The Belgian is currently in seventh place 58 seconds behind Pogacar – that should be too much for the yellow jersey.
The fourth stage started calmly, but the final had it all: five mountain ratings, including the steep ramp Sainte-Hillaire with up to 16 percent climb, caused a classic-like finish. An early outland group was set around 20 kilometers before the finish – after that the favorites took command. The plan did not work for Lipowitz and Roglic. Lipowitz had announced that it wanted to protect Roglic before the start – in the end the strength was missing.