Tour de France 2025: Van der Poel sprints to stage two victory and into yellow jersey
The Dutchman thwarted Tadej Pogacar's attempt to take the 100th win of his career, outsprinting the defending Tour champion on the steady final climb of the Boulevard Auguste Mariette.
'The final was actually harder than I thought,' said Van der Poel. 'I was really motivated. It's four years since I won my first stage on the Tour, so it was about time I won a second one.'
Philipsen, who had started the stage in the yellow jersey after winning stage one to Lille on Saturday, was distanced in the closing kilometres and Van der Poel took the race lead from the Belgian sprinter.
'People said I was a favourite, but if you see which riders were in front, on the climbs, I did a really good job today to be there,' said Van der Poel, winner of the 2023 World Road Race Championships in Glasgow. 'The climbs were harder than I expected and [ridden at] a hard pace. It was a nervous day again.'
Pogacar's main rival, Jonas Vingegaard of Visma-Lease a Bike, followed the Slovenian across the finish line, with the Olympic champion, Remco Evenepoel, distanced on Saturday's stage, showing greater vigilance to also finish in the front group.
Meanwhile, away from the Tour, Vingegaard's wife, Trine Vingegaard Hansen, told the Danish newspaper Politiken that the Visma-Lease a Bike team is pushing her husband 'too far'. 'I'm afraid he's burning the candle at both ends,' she said of the double Tour winner. 'I think people sometimes forget the human being behind the athlete. It could all backfire.'
Primoz Roglic, only a year ago characterised as one of the Tour's 'big four', finished in the lead group after ceding ground in Lille, but has done little so far to dispel the impression that he has relinquished any lingering hopes of contending for the overall title.
The Slovenian is the winner of the Vuelta a España four times and also the Giro d'Italia in 2023, but told the media as the race began that he 'didn't really care' and just wanted to 'make it to Paris for a glass of champagne'. He has been anonymous so far.
The 35-year-old was, with his Bora Hansghrohe teammate Florian Lipowitz, among those who missed Saturday's decisive split in the front group on the fast approach to Lille. 'The guys were asleep,' Roglic's sports director, Enrico Gasparotto, said of their costly error on the opening stage. 'We talked about that stretch, the wind and the related dangers, but they were surprised. We are all aware of the opportunity we wasted: Roglic and Lipowitz lost the chance to gain time on Remco. We learned an important lesson.'
Worse befell the hapless French rider Benjamin Thomas, who crashed on Saturday's stage while fighting his compatriot Mattéo Vercher for a single point in the mountains classification on Mont Cassel. He woke on Sunday morning to the news that his bike, along with 10 others from the Cofidis team, worth about €140,000 (£120,000), had been stolen from their vehicles overnight.
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Ineos Grenadiers are also already on the back foot, having lost the time-trialling powerhouse Filippo Ganna on stage one to a concussion, while their team leader, Carlos Rodríguez, and the 2018 Tour winner, Geraint Thomas, both missed the decisive break in Saturday's dramatic finale in Lille.
Movistar's Marlen Reusser won the individual time trial opening stage of the Giro d'Italia Women to claim the race leader's pink jersey. The Swiss national time trial champion went 12 seconds quicker than Lotte Kopecky on the 14.2km course through Bergamo to claim the stage win and will wear the maglia rosa during Monday's second stage from Clusone to Aprica. The Italian Elisa Longo Borghini finished third, 16 seconds behind Reusser.
Both Rodríguez and Thomas lost a further 31sec to the front group on the run-in to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and are now 1min 16sec behind Pogacar after the opening weekend.
Sir Dave Brailsford, Ineos's returning supremo, and Thomas, his management protege in waiting, already have much to ponder. 'I should have stopped last year, to be honest,' the 39-year-old Welshman observed drily on Saturday. Monday is another day, but there is yet another tricky stage to come, through the Nord and towards the Channel, this time to Dunkirk, in which the cobbles of Mont Cassel and the crosswinds off the sea will again play their part.
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Jonas Vingegaard has lost belief he can beat Tadej Pogacar
Hindsight allows us to see with greater clarity. As a contest, the Tour de France ended on the day it was meant to begin. That was the first truly mountainous race to Hautacam, the 12th of 21 stages. It was the moment Tadej Pogacar chose to remind his adversaries they were wasting their time. He will clinch his fourth Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées at tea-time on Sunday but the outcome was known for ten days. Pogacar is the greatest rider of this generation and there are good reasons for considering him the best of all time. When he races, things happen. He has, after all, won 21 stages of the Tour de France and yet the victory at Hautacam ten days ago was still exceptional. For months this was the stage he had targeted, believing it would give him the Yellow Jersey and with the help of his team, they would keep it. Unexpected things happen in the Tour and the day before Hautacam Pogacar crashed close to the finish in Toulouse. It was a high-speed fall where for a frightening second, it seemed his head was about to collide with a 9in roadside kerb. Luckily he instinctively got his head up and just missed the kerb. Still it was a heavy fall and he felt beaten up. Please enable cookies and other technologies to view this content. You can update your cookies preferences any time using privacy manager. That was purely physical. 'Tadej is mentally very strong,' UAE doctor Adrian Rotunno said at the Base Camp Lodge Hotel in Albertville on Friday night. 'We were worried about the impact of that fall. He wasn't.' Hautacam is a 13.5-kilometre climb at an average gradient of 7.8 per cent. This puts it up there with the toughest ascents. They had barely hit Hautacam when Pogacar got team-mates Tim Wellens and Jhonatan Narváez to increase the tempo. They knew the plan because both — Narváez especially — went so fast it seemed they had lost their minds. Only Pogacar and his forever rival, Jonas Vingegaard, could follow Narváez's infernal pace. Of course he could not keep it up for long and when he pulled to one side, Pogacar went even faster. Vingegaard tried to stay with him and for a kilometre or so, he stayed at ten and 12 seconds back. Please enable cookies and other technologies to view this content. You can update your cookies preferences any time using privacy manager. The problem for any rider chasing Pogacar is that if the Slovenian wants to gain time, he does not let up. Takes a short breather and he goes again. He extends his lead, another breather and goes again. No relenting until he has crossed the line and there is no more time to be taken. At Hautacam he arrived 2min 10sec before Vingegaard, the first time in their five-year rivalry that he had taken more than two minutes on the Dane in a stage of the Tour. That gave him an overall lead of 3:31. He tagged on another 36 seconds in the next day's mountain time trial and then, truly, the race was over. This is not a bike rider who loses a lead of four minutes in the Tour. Something else died on Hautacam; namely, the intense rivalry between Pogacar and Vingegaard. Again with the benefit of hindsight we could argue this had happened at the previous month's Critérium du Dauphiné. On three mountain stages Pogacar toyed with his rival. And if there were any doubts about his superiority after the Critérium, they were banished on Hautacam. This led to a certain desperation about Visma-Lease a Bike's approach to the Tour. They set out to upset Pogacar, to do whatever they could to get under his skin. Their difficulty was finding a way. Their leader Vingegaard rode aggressively from the start which was unusual because the hilly stages of the first week did not play to his strengths. It was clear though that Vingegaard was riding strongly, perhaps as well as he has ever done. But on the short, sharp hills into Boulogne, Rouen, Vire-Normandie and Mûr-de-Bretagne, he could not hurt Pogacar. On every stage that Vingegaard finished alongside or just behind Pogacar, he was visibly pleased. That suggested he was content to just hang in there. His team sought to play with Pogacar's head. Their riders attacked not to break away but merely to provoke a reaction from him. He did react and when he realised what they were doing, he thought it ridiculous. Matteo Jorgenson got in his way at a feed zone on the seventh stage and that led to a little pushing match. On Friday's stage to La Plagne, Vingegaard refused to work with Pogacar to rein in the breakaway Thymen Arensman and that infuriated Pogacar. He ended up letting Arensman take the stage because he was not going to tow Vingegaard up to the breakaway. He also squandered his own chance of winning that stage. Visma wanted to get inside his head and they succeeded. At what cost to themselves? The operation was a success but the patient died. From this Tour, we learned why Pogacar loves racing against Mathieu van der Poel and why he chooses to ride the one-day Classics: Flanders, Roubaix, Strade Bianche, Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. In these races, there is not the time or indeed the inclination to play what Pogacar sees as silly games. Visma have some soul-searching to do. They started the Tour protesting total allegiance to Vingegaard only to start looking for stage victories as soon as they thought their man was not going to beat Pogacar. What is certain is that Vingegaard no longer believes he can beat his rival. In this year's Tour, he has performed better than when beating Pogacar in 2022 and 2023. Last year was dispiriting for him. This year was worse. There were moments in the race when, sitting right behind Pogacar after he had attacked Vingegaard looked to check on those directly behind him. He is now as concerned by the riders creeping up on him as he is by one riding away from him. He knows that in a year's time, the German Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and the Scot Oscar Onley (Picnic PostNL) will believe they can challenge Pogacar. Lipowitz and Onley battled for the third step on the podium and even though the German got there, Onley will not be discouraged. At 22, he is two years younger than his rival and he showed he belongs at this level. From a promising third place in last month's Tour de Suisse to fourth in the Tour de France with eight top-ten finishes is some leap. The penultimate stage from Nantua to Pontarlier sent the peloton through the Jura, a 184-kilometre route that had four not overly severe climbs but the weather was horrible and the race difficult. An early break got a gap and they had the day to themselves. 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