Highlights: 2025 Tour de France, Stage 21 finish
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New Straits Times
21 minutes ago
- New Straits Times
Supreme Pogacar wins Tour de France for fourth time
PARIS: Tadej Pogacar closed out a supreme 21-day performance to win the Tour de France in Paris on Sunday, crushing his rivals in the 3,400km slog to rack up a fourth title. Wout van Aert won the final-day cliffhanger on the cobbled roads of Montmartre, but Pogacar was spared any late challenge when rain forced times to be neutralised to avoid potential accidents. Pogacar gamely tried for the stage win anyway before Belgian Van Aert pulled away from the Slovenian on the last climb. The winner was clearly enjoying himself as he played to the delighted crowds, racing to the head of the peloton near the Moulin Rouge cabaret at the foot of the climb. Despite the rain, spectators packed Montmartre to follow his progress up and down the narrow lanes of the popular tourist spot in his leader's yellow outfit. Van Aert produced a well-timed attack to drop Pogacar and charge to the Champs-Elysees finish line, for his second last-day stage win there. Pogacar was fourth on the day but after wins in 2020, 2021 and 2024, he proved untouchable again in the world's greatest bike race. Jonas Vingegaard, the Dane who won in 2022 and 2023, suffered two shocking off-days and ended second overall, 4min 24sec adrift. Breakout German star Florian Lipowitz took third on his debut, rounding out the podium a distant 11 minutes off the pace in third. Defending his title Pogacar, embarked from the start in Lille clear favourite and won four stages along the way. In the first week, he struck on rolling runs in the north and west at Rouen and the Mur de Bretagne. He then turned the screw on the slopes of the Pyrenees on week two with his rivals as good as vanquished. Vingegaard suffered on the stage five time trial, and again in week two at the Hautacam mountain, leaving the Dane in shock as his form abandoned him. In need of a massive turn around in the Alps to overturn a four-minute deficit, Vingegaard was game enough to go all in on stage 18, producing a brave 71km attack as Pogacar sat on his rival's wheel. A barnstorming first week of the Tour revealed a raft of emerging stars. Lipowitz was given a run for his money for third place by 22-year-old Scot Oscar Onley, whose steady ride propelled him to fourth overall. Ireland's Ben Healy bagged a stage win and a two-day stint in the yellow jersey. Adding a heroic near-miss on Mont Ventoux was enough to earn Healy the prize for combativity, voted for by the public. The return of Dave Brailsford from his role at Manchester United to Ineos Grenadiers was overshadowed by the team's Italian powerhouse Filippo Ganna falling early on stage one. He was withdrawn due to concussion. Having previously masterminded seven Tour de France wins, Brailsford dug in and the team's Dutch climber Thymen Arensman pulled off heists in the Pyrenees and the Alps with well-executed attacks to win two stages. Another Dutch rider, Mathieu van der Poel, lit up the first week, sealing a stage two win and twice wearing the yellow jersey. France's sole and unexpected stage win came on the lunar-like summit of Mont Ventoux thanks to Valentin Paret-Peintre. The 2025 Tour, however, will be remembered mainly for Pogacar's all-round dominance. - AFP
Times
37 minutes ago
- Times
Tadej Pogacar is exceptional but I think he is also clean
The rain poured and the roads in the capital were treacherous. So dangerous that Tour de France organisers agreed time differences wouldn't count. All that Tadej Pogacar had to do to clinch his fourth Tour de France was to avoid risk. Find a safe place in the peloton and stay upright. Simple, but he couldn't do it. Like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Pogacar could only play the man he is. So on this first occasion of a splendid new route for the final stage, he got involved in a fierce battle for the stage victory, taking the same risks as the other five riders in the breakaway. There were three ascents of the 1.1-kilometre Côte de la Butte Montmartre, and each time he attacked. Every ascent was followed by descents in the driving rain. On the last circuit, Pogacar distanced four of the five in the group but Wout van Aert stayed with him and then near the top, the Belgian counterattacked. For the first time in the Tour, Pogacar himself was distanced. Van Aert went on to achieve a famous victory, slowing down better to savour the moment as he crossed the finish line on the Champs-Élysées. For his Visma-Lease a Bike team it was a terrific end to a difficult Tour. It was the team's second stage victory and their leader, Jonas Vingegaard, finished second overall, but that was still less than they had hoped for. 'We came to win the Yellow Jersey but came up against the strongest rider in the race and best rider in the world,' Van Aert said. In dreadful conditions, it was a compelling climax that validated the decision to dispense with what had long been a ceremonial end to the Tour, a race in which little happened and almost always ended with a bunch sprint. Pogacar knew the risks of trying to win the final stage. One bad fall and that could have been him out of the race. And still, he couldn't play safe. 'I found myself in the front,' he said afterwards, 'even though I didn't have the energy to motivate myself to race. I tried but hats off to Wout, he was incredibly strong. It was a really nice race in the end today. I am speechless to win a fourth Tour. Six years in a row on the podium and this one feels especially amazing. I am super-proud to wear this Yellow Jersey. 'The second week was the decisive week where we took the decisive advantage and we went more comfortably into the final week. Battling against Jonas was again a tough experience but respect to him and big congratulations for his fight. Now it's time to celebrate. I want to celebrate with peace this week and have nice weather, not like now.' The other general classification (GC) contenders stayed well clear of the fight on that hill in Montmartre and were happy just to stay upright. Vingegaard poured every ounce of himself into the three-week battle against Pogacar and though the contest was relatively close, he lost every round. His two bad days, in the Caen time-trial and on Hautacam, were two more than he could afford. Pogacar hasn't had a bad day at the Tour since Col de la Loze in 2023. Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora-Hangrohe) and Oscar Onley (Picnic-PostNL), who finished third and fourth, were the revelations of the race. They will now be contenders in whatever grand tour they care to ride and it will be interesting to watch Ben Healy's development. Could he too become a grand tour contender? Lipowitz, Onley, Healy and plenty of others will wonder about Pogacar, 26, and how long he can continue at his present level. Their futures are connected to his. There is an interesting conversation about this, the most recent demonstration of one rider's brilliance. Many consider this to be a compelling renewal of the greatest bike race. Others shake their heads and bemoan the predictability. Didn't Pogacar, they ask without needing an answer, drive a stake through the heart of his only rival, Vingegaard, on the first day in the high mountains? And wasn't that ten days before the end? Like beauty, riveting sport is in the eye of the beholder. There is no right answer, only opinions. Each one as valid as the next. My view is complicated by more than four decades of following and writing about the Tour. First experience was 1982, the last two days, which are generally the two least interesting. We went because that year our Irish compatriot Sean Kelly won the Green Jersey for the first time. That Sunday's finish on the Champs-Élysées was curious . It was Bernard Hinault's fourth Tour and by then, even the French were growing tired of his success. That year Hinault had taken his advantage in the time-trials and then defended in the mountains. Breathtaking, it wasn't. Towards the end, the lament was that he hadn't been able to take a proper road stage. Reacting to the criticism, Hinault contested the bunch sprint on the Champs-Élysées. It wasn't something he did often but he won it. Through rookie eyes, it seemed an unusual outcome. How could a GC rider suddenly become a bunch sprinter and beat all the specialists? One rider in that Tour said that it was either let Hinault win on the Champs-Élysées or not be invited to post-Tour criteriums in Brittany. I'm still not sure if he was joking. Back then it was common for deals to be struck between riders and between teams. Results were traded; sometimes for the promise of future help, sometimes for cash. The more you thought you knew, the less you actually knew. Two days in 1982 became two weeks in 1983, and in 1984, the entire Tour with the sacred green badge given to an accredited journalist. Though the race had a certain global appeal, no one would have mistaken it for a slick global operation. They were elite-level athletes staying in school dormitories while riding the Tour. Dormitories without air conditioning, on the hottest Tour nights. It was, though, a good race for journalists. Walk into a hotel, or indeed a school dormitory and there was a list on the wall telling the room number of each rider. No one wondered where you were going or worried too much about the demands on riders. And on the Reims to Nancy stage of the 1985 Tour, Ludwig Wynants consummated my relationship with the Tour. For years, I had struggled with a speech disorder. In any kind of pressurised situation, I stuttered. It wasn't much fun. That year I agreed to do daily reports for RTE radio from the Tour, thinking that if I could survive live radio, the speech problem would be overcome. Shock treatment, you could say. I knew from experience that words beginning with L and W were particularly challenging. So Ludwig Wynants was a nightmare. The last two words of the report delivered live on RTE that Saturday afternoon were 'Ludwig Wynants'. The name emerged almost fluently and, from that day, things improved. So I owe the Tour. The Eightiess were good: Laurent Fignon against Hinault in '84; Hinault against Greg LeMond in '85; LeMond against Hinault in '86; Stephen Roche against Pedro Delgado in '87. They were interesting races but if we'd been more honest in those, we would have wondered aloud about the abuse of testosterone, cortisone and other banned drugs. Without ever talking about it, riders informed us that what they took was their business, not ours. For the most part we agreed. There was a price to be paid for our compliance with omertà, the law of silence. In 1990 Paul Kimmage's Rough Ride was published and the ex-professional laid bare the endemic doping culture within cycling, not that many were ready to accept the truth. For this was the beginning of the EPO years and however bad things had been, they weren't getting any better. For so long, it was impossible to believe in the Tour. The Nineties were a continuation of the Eighties, the Noughties were as bad as the Nineties and then along came Team Sky, winning seven out of eight Tours. They talked of winning clean but since 2016 there has been scandal after scandal related to how that team was run. The latest surfaced two weeks ago and now the International Testing Agency has opened an investigation into former Sky, now Ineos Grenadiers', soigneur David Rozman. In 2020, along came Pogacar. The then 21-year-old won his first Tour de France. He's now ridden the race six times; four victories and twice runner-up. He improves a little every year but he is essentially the same rider now as back then, and pretty much every week of every season. There hasn't been any evidence of wrongdoing. I believe he's an exceptional, credible champion. Consequently his victories are never boring and his dominance is a joy, not a reason for suspicion. This era has been the most credible that cycling has known and it should be celebrated.
Qatar Tribune
41 minutes ago
- Qatar Tribune
Pogacar wins fourth Tour de France title as Van Aert takes last stage
PA Media/DPA Paris Tadej Pogacar celebrated his fourth Tour de France title in Paris but was denied what would have been a stunning final stage victory as Wout van Aert rode away on the wet cobbles of Montmartre to win on the Champs-Elysees. Pogacar looked keen to take what could prove to be a unique opportunity to win in yellow in Paris as the introduction of three ascents of the climb to Montmartre reshaped the usual final day procession into the capital, but Van Aert broke clear on the last time up to take the glory on Sunday. Although the general classification times had been neutralized in the soggy conditions, Pogacar still had to finish to secure his title yet was willing to risk it all on the greasy cobbles in pursuit of a fifth stage win of this Tour. The Slovenian attacked each time up the narrow climb to whittle down a leading group to just a handful of riders, but had no response when Van Aert made his move 400 metres from the summit of the final ascent, winning solo by 19 seconds from Davide Ballerini. Pogacar, 26, sat up to safely bring home the yellow jersey and beat his rival Jonas Vingegaard by a final margin of four minutes and 24 seconds, moving level with Chris Froome on four titles, one shy of the record jointly held by Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Jacques Anquetil. 'I'm just speechless to win a fourth Tour de France, six years in a row on the podium,' the 26-year-old Pogacar said. 'This one feels especially amazing and I'm super proud I can wear this yellow jersey. 'I found myself in the front even though I didn't really have the energy to motivate myself to race today. I was really happy they neutralized the times in the GC, then it was more relaxed to race. I found myself in the front but hats off to Wout, he was incredibly strong.' German Florian Lipowitz finished third overall, some 11 minutes down on Pogacar and one minute three seconds ahead of 22-year-old Scot Oscar Onley who has enjoyed a breakout Tour. On the 50th anniversary of the first Champs-Elysees finish, the race returned to the French capital after last year's enforced absence due to the Olympic Games. Race organizers had been inspired by incredible scenes in Montmartre during those Games to add the climb to this day and totally shake up the complexion of the usual parade into Paris. The route change left potential for time gaps at the finish, but with heavy rain falling organisers announced general classification times would be taken earlier in the stage to remove the peril. After the usual photoshoots on the approach to the capital, the race was on as soon as they hit the Champs-Elysees for the first time before really exploding on the first time up the climb. Pogacar's attacks splintered the groups but Van Aert had team-mate Matteo Jorgenson to help him and used his relative freshness to power away from Pogacar in the decisive moment.
