In the midst of his majesty: How Tadej Pogacar won the 2026 Tour de France

PARIS, France —  The occupants of Tadej Pogačar’s team car cried when he won on Alpe d’Huez. The now five-time Tour de France champion just felt bemused.

“I would say just as much as any other win,” he replied when asked of the importance of his stage 19 victory, his first ever on the Alps’ most iconic climb. “But now that every single journalist says how big this win is, maybe I’ll start to realise it too. Maybe I’ll appreciate it once it settles down.”

Pogačar’s wins are like mayflies; they come in hordes and live for a day, in his mind at least. The 2026 Tour de France was a demonstration of his dominance over the cycling world. The yellow jersey is the greatest rider of his generation, and most likely any. He makes the incomprehensible look banal; is this magical realism or the inversion of it?

The Slovenian took five stage victories and gifted two away, bringing his Tour de France total to 26, just nine shy of record-holder Mark Cavendish. Alpe d’Huez was his 16th win on a mountain top finish — double that of closest challenger Lucien Van Impe.

And here is the big one: the stonemasons are going to have to carve a fifth face on cycling’s Mount Rushmore, Pogačar joining Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain on five Tour de France victories.

It has already felt as if he belonged along them for a while. At 27, he is the same age as when Indurain won his first. In all likelihood, Pogačar will go on to eclipse them — and even go past Lance Armstrong’s erased mark of seven.

This Tour will be remembered as Pogačar in the midst of his majesty; a relentless march towards victory which felt all but assured within the first week. It was an imposition of order; the barbarians tamed before they reached the gates. The man astride the moat was not a new version of Pogačar, but the final optimized evolution — or perhaps not.

“I must say, I felt this year that I’ve not been getting much stronger since 2024,” Pogačar said before Paris. “The numbers are there, you know, but as you get more experience, you deal with things differently. It’s small things that are improving, the mood and emotions. I think that’s why I wrote this story.”

And yet, the beauty of a Grand Tour are the chapters it contains. Within these three weeks, there was team sickness, disruptive late-night anti-doping tests, a peloton vexed at UAE Team Emirates’ perceived greed, and an unusual source of motivation.

This is how Tadej Pogačar won the 2026 Tour de France.

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Officially, the Tour’s designers deny that its route is constructed with any rider in mind. That assertion is thinner than gossamer. This parcours was conceived to prevent Pogačar from seizing an unassailable lead too early in the race, with just one stage in the high Pyrenees, and the next truly difficult summit finish not reached until Le Markstein on stage 14.

“We made the finish as difficult as possible so the yellow jersey won’t be secure 48 hours before the end,” race director Christian Prudhomme said when the route was announced.

Would it affect Pogačar? “That’s difficult to predict, because he’s already shown he can gain time on every kind of terrain,” Prudhomme replied. “But the course has been drawn to build gradually, stage after stage, with tension that keeps growing.”

Best laid plans and all that. Clad in the world champion’s rainbow jersey, Pogačar blew away the general classification contenders over the Col du Tourmalet, gaining almost three minutes on Jonas Vingegaard by the finish at Gavarnie-Gèdre.

Five days earlier, Vingegaard and Visma-Lease a Bike’s victory in the opening team time trial had suggested the Dutch squad may have the ability to match UAE — in Pogačar’s two Tour defeats, his team was comprehensively outmatched. But here, on stage six, Visma were deconstructed man for man.

Visma had men up the road, but their satellite riders were brought in by relentless pacing from Tim Wellens and Nils Politt, UAE’s road captains. Teammates Adam Yates and Brandon McNulty upped the pace and dropped Vingegaard’s domestiques Matteo Jorgenson and Davide Piganzoli from the bunch. And then Isaac del Toro took over — the young Mexican’s acceleration dropping Vingegaard behind him.

Pogačar soared over the Tourmalet to take 30 seconds by the summit, another 40 seconds on the descent, and twisted the knife by gaining another minute and a half to the line. He was giddy as he crossed the line, and for much of the evening afterwards; it was a striking comparison to the gaunt and jaded Pogačar during the final week of last year’s Tour.

A large part of that has been his relationship with the 22-year-old Del Toro, a friendship in which Pogačar plays the mentor’s role. After gifting his younger teammate victory on Montjuic on stage two, Pogačar appeared the happiest he has all season, conducting the crowd in chants and draping himself in the Mexican flag.

“It’s so important for the team that they became friends,” Pogačar’s mother Marjeta told The Athletic midway through the race. “Perhaps the most important thing for the team.”

Theirs was a comradeship which defined the race, from its decisive attack, to Pogačar’s help in the white jersey competition, to Del Toro’s decision to crash himself on stage 15 to save his leader from falling. After the Mexican secured his podium atop Alpe d’Huez on Saturday, Pogačar pointed his fingers upwards on either side of his head to make horns — Del Toro, the bull.

“We clicked really quick when (Del Toro) came to the team,” said Pogačar. “He had good energy, it was a good relationship, good humour. And then we raced together and he was always there for me, 100 per cent.

“This year, he could have gone for his chance in Strade Bianche, he could probably win, he could go to the Giro, the Vuelta, whatever, but he came to the Tour and committed to the biggest goal of the team to win the yellow.”

And if this Tour is remembered for anything except Pogačar’s dominance, it might be for the introduction of the next generation, for the debuts of 19-year-old Frenchman Paul Seixas and of Del Toro, the Slovenian’s anointed heir.

“I’m not going to race much longer,” Pogačar told Eurosport on Saturday. “He has incredible potential and talent to be my successor.”

“When you’re great, I smash you,” Pogacar joked to Del Toro in Paris. “We’re actually big rivals.”

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There are other reasons, too, behind Pogačar’s mental revival this Tour. One is his schedule, deliberately left lighter this year to reduce his workload, both physically and psychologically.

He competed in just one week-long stage race this year, the Tour de Suisse, compared to two last season and the Giro d’Italia in 2024, allowing him to concentrate on the spring Classics, a discipline Pogačar loves.

Another aspect which Visma were hoping to exploit was an historic weakness in the dry heat, a feature exposed on the Col de la Loze three years ago — ahead of what would prove to be the hottest Tour in history, with numerous stages around 104F (40C).

After going without specific heat training for the first four years of his professional career, Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates squad began to specifically work on these adaptations at the end of 2023 — paying off over the boiling heat of the Tourmalet and the Massif Central’s Le Lioran.

It is just another example of one of Pogačar’s greatest traits; to remember defeats and act on them. Because those defeats are so scarce, they stick longer.

The importance of nutrition and off-strength bike training are two broader subjects, but over the Tourmalet, he remembered Vingegaard and Wout van Aert catching him on its descent in 2022. He also recalled the Dane reeling him back by riding his own tempo in Morzine, and resolved to dupe his great rival by baiting Vingegaard to go over his limit.

His Tour de France stage win percentage of 17.6 per cent is now the best in history, going past Mark Cavendish this year — and approaches 50 percent when limited to mountain top finishes. One colleague refers to him as Monsieur Mangetout — the man that eats everything.

Pogačar’s sunnier disposition this Tour has only darkened on two occasions; both times when asked whether he enjoys grinding those rivals to dust — and whether he thought that his UAE Team Emirates team were greedy for doing so.

He ended one interview over the question, telling the journalist he needed to warm down on the rollers, while in the second, he learned of Florian Lipowitz’s comments with incredulity: “If you go only for second place, it’s a pity, no?”

From Pogačar’s perspective, he owes it to his team as a professional to win the races which he is paid to do, gave one win away to Del Toro, and arguably a second to Remco Evenepoel on stage 15. Yet cycling’s code of ethics is both large and indistinct; the scale of Pogačar’s dominance threatens its traditions.

Whatever the yellow jersey’s feelings, teams were annoyed, often more privately than publicly. After four stage wins in the opening week, several riders and bosses were angered when UAE attempted to reel in the breakaway on stage 9 into Ussel, seemingly for little reason.

Riders begged Pogačar, the peloton’s patron, for an opportunity. “I asked him if he believed in the breakaway today,” said Uno-X’s Tobias Halland Johannessen. “He replied: ‘Maybe not.’”

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It was 5am on July 19 when Pogačar’s Sunday kicked off with an early morning anti-doping test. Vingegaard had been tested three hours earlier. Pogačar, unable to get back to sleep, listened to Eminem and brewed himself a coffee. The Plateau de Solaison, later that day, would be the race’s toughest climb since the Tourmalet.

Vingegaard never made it to the summit. The Dane crashed in the final 20km of the stage — refusing to blame the impact of tiredness from the drugs test, though teammates, coaches, and fellow riders all named it a contributing factor — a reminder of how capricious the race can be.

Pogačar dealt extensively with the topic in his news conference later that day, speaking in detail about the changes in blood-testing protocols, applauding the politeness of the doctors, and discussing whether night-time testing is an invasion of rider privacy.

“I don’t argue,” he said. “I hope I will sleep after. I couldn’t. It’s a little bit strange, but I accept it if this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean, then I totally accept it. I commit to it.

“But it’s s**t when you sleep for four hours in the middle of a three-week Tour… But if this is what we have to do, then we do it.”

The International Testing Agency (ITA), cycling’s anti-doping testing body, has said that “effective testing must, in limited and justified circumstances, be capable of occurring outside standard daytime hours”. The Athletic reported last week that riders from at least three other teams were tested in the middle of the night during the race, with the ITA applying for permission from a French judge before the beginning of the race.

Questions about Pogačar’s performances are inevitable. He is the sport’s most dominant force for decades, and is at the vanguard of a generation beating climbing records set during the EPO era. For all the improvements in nutrition, technology, and heat adaptation, memories of the sport’s dirty era pervade — especially in a peloton where a number of team bosses and coaches have historically worked with teams who have been implicated.

That extends to Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates boss Mauro Gianetti, who worked at the Saunier-Duval team in the 2000s when several riders were found to have tested positive for PEDs.

Asked by L’Équipe this week for his reflections on Saunier’s doping cases, Gianetti responded that he saw himself “as a victim” who had been deceived by riders. “You never know what your children do in their rooms, and you certainly don’t know what the riders do at home,” he added.

Pogačar, it should be stressed, has never failed a doping test, nor have any credible allegations ever been raised of wrongdoing.

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The tests were the talk of the Tour for 72 hours — but the yellow jersey wore them lightly. Far more of an apparent issue, as the race approached the Alps, was a gastrointestinal illness which swept through the UAE Team Emirates squad after the second rest day.

Climbing domestique Yates was the first to ail, narrowly making the time cut on stage 17, before rouleur Wellens and American climber McNulty also fell ill. McNulty was forced to abandon the race on stage 18, and with Belgian powerhouse Florian Vermeersch dealing with his own injury, Pogačar suddenly looked isolated.

His decision to pair black shorts with the yellow jersey for the first time in his career also raised speculation that the race leader, too, was sick. Never had so much attention been paid to his sartorial choices.

Pogačar answered those questions on Alpe d’Huez, leaping from the peloton at the foot of the climb in a bid to catch the breakaway, three and a half minutes up the road. Nobody dared follow.

He clawed back time by the bend, eventually catching Richard Carapaz and Lenny Martinez as the barriers began with four kilometers to go — and kicked clear in the final kilometer to take his fifth stage win, having ascended the famous climb in 35 minutes and 26 seconds. In total, he won five of the seven summit finishes.

🔻 One final kilometre to etch your name into the history of Alpe d’Huez!

🔻 Un dernier kilomètre pour inscrire son nom dans la légende de l’Alpe d’Huez !#TDF2026 | @Continental_fr pic.twitter.com/VegHQ0TBsH

— Tour de France™ (@LeTour) July 24, 2026

One day later, the yellow jersey turned domestique to help Del Toro onto the podium, marking Seixas’ attacks before the Mexican attacked himself. The pair crossed the finish arm in arm, Pogačar whispering in his teammate’s ear to keep pedaling to the line. Del Toro revealed, later that evening, that he too had been sick.

At the start of the Tour, Pogačar had been asked about his hopes for Del Toro at the race. “To win the Tour de France!” he replied.

Del Toro may be the next new name to take the yellow jersey, but Pogačar has some years left yet. The youngest rider to ever win five Tours, he arguably still has six seasons left in his prime.

For some, his dominance has a flipside; it spawns boos, invites questions, and creates apathy. To be the greatest rider ever, there are going to be a lot of days where the underdog does not win.

Other cyclists have experienced this before — Indurain, Armstrong — and more will experience it again. It was just six summers ago when Pogačar was the 21-year-old tyro emerging as cyclist’s most exciting talent.

The yellow jersey’s motivation has always been somewhat inscrutable, Pogačar bristling at theories presented to him. The best answers: his love of racing, his love of riding, and simply because he can. He has just three major races left to win — the Vuelta a España, Olympic gold, and Paris-Roubaix — but only the last appears to hold major cachet for him.

It was underscored in the Tour’s final kilometers, a blur of hurt and lactic and guts over the Paris cobbles, swapping turns with Mathieu van der Poel towards a dream win on the Champs-Élysées. Was this not supposed to be ceremonial? Lesser riders were already sipping the champagne. As he tied up in the last 800m, it was his body, not his mind, giving up the stage. Even that was a surprise.

This Tour proved that Pogačar is not motivated by making history. Regardless, he is on track to complete it.