Why the 2026 Tour de France has been blessed by its green, white and polka dot jersey competitions
The sight that brought it home was the slender figure of Valentin Paret-Peintre, slumped against the barriers on the summit of Alpe d’Huez, sobbing and mourning the loss of his polka-dot jersey.
With the Tour lacking a French stage winner for the first time since 1999, the king of the mountains award was one of the country’s final hopes of bringing honor to Paris.
For many years, the mountains classification has not been the most storied of jerseys. A design loved by fans, yes, a novelty, but a footnote in the race, a way for broadcasters to fill dead air time at the beginning of Alpine stages. For four of the past six years, with highest-value points saved for mountain finishes, it has been won by the yellow jersey — three times to Tadej Pogačar (2020, 2021, 2025) and once by Jonas Vingegaard (2022).
This year’s winner, 33-year-old Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz, was not originally supposed to be at the Tour. His original goal was the Giro d’Italia this spring, a race he had almost won the previous year, only for an operation on a perineal cyst to rule him out of the battle for pink. He could not sit on the bike to train for three weeks.
That injury has long healed — but Carapaz is still seemingly incapable of sitting in his saddle, permanently on his pedals and on the attack, chasing rivals, stages, and the polka-dot jersey.
With Pogačar all but sealing yellow less than a week into the race, the Tour’s Alpine denouement could have been anticlimactic. Instead, the battle for the other three jerseys — polka dot, white, and green — has animated this race, with the trio finally and only settled on stage 20.
“It’s been incredible this year,” said a beaming Carapaz, having become the first rider to win a stage in the polka-dot jersey since Julian Alaphilippe in 2018, atop Alpe d’Huez no less.
“Not only this fight, but for the green and white as well. There have been many interests — and that has made the race harder and harder.”
Carapaz has now won the King of the Mountains competition in two of the last three editions of the Tour de France. (Jeff Pachoud / Getty Images)
Mads Pedersen and his Lidl-Trek team have resolved to push the pace even on easier sprint stages. For Pedersen, the green jersey was a non-negotiable. The team was built around his pursuit of the points classification. General classification climbers Juan Ayuso and Mattias Skjelmose were largely left to their own devices. Talented riders such as Quinn Simmons and Mathias Vacek were requisitioned in support of their sprinter, who was aiming to become the first Dane to win the green jersey.
Knowing he was not the fastest man in the bunch, Pedersen aimed to capitalize on the intermediate sprints — efforts midway through every stage worth fewer points (25 for the first rider) than the finishes — and backed his ability to climb better than the other sprinters to access the points on offer during hilly or mountainous stages.
It meant that Lidl-Trek ramped up the pace on any sprint stage with only a small bump, hoping to drop Tim Merlier and Olav Kooij, and leading to attacking racing from the front of the bunch.
Though his lead was briefly cut to seven points by Jasper Philipsen after stage 18, Pedersen’s intermediate sprint wins over the next three days secured his green jersey. The 30-year-old won 68 percent of his points in intermediate sprints — and 80 percent of the total number of intermediate sprint points on offer.
For much of the race, his fight with Philipsen and Merlier was a battle of opposites; the true fast men against one of the most versatile and powerful riders in the peloton.
There is a debate over whether it is right that a rider who was not, truly, among the five fastest sprinters in the race should be awarded the ‘sprinters’ jersey’ — but Merlier failed to finish the race because of his lack of climbing legs, while Philipsen was out of form. Pedersen was the deserving winner — at times, appearing to be a worthy successor to the legendary Peter Sagan.
Pedersen worked heroically in the week three mountains to secure his green jersey. (Loic Venance / AFP via Getty Images)
Isaac del Toro and Paul Seixas’ duel was a battle for third place, in the main, but also for the white jersey — a prize that both riders mentioned when discussing the motivations behind their own races.
“We’re in the running for the yellow jersey and then also the white jersey,” Pogačar said of his support for Del Toro.
On the mountain finishes, Del Toro finished in front five times, 19-year-old Seixas three. This was the next generation duking it out, wrestling in the mud into the final competitive stage.
Seixas, trailing by 24 seconds entering the stage, knew that one decisive attack would deliver him to Paris in white, a jersey he wore for a single stage after Le Markstein. Del Toro looked in trouble approaching the summit of the Col du Galibier, the race’s highest point, urgently speaking into his radio and dropping back.
Seixas wore the white jersey for only one day but appears destined to win it in future editions. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)
The young Frenchman reacted, with his domestiques Nicolas Prodhomme and Matthew Riccitello upping the pace, ready for Seixas to attack. And yet, when Seixas hit the front, he finally discovered his own limits, grinding and toiling through the afternoon sun as Del Toro countered, dancing up the road to seal the white jersey by over two minutes.
The Mexican revealed after the stage that he had been struggling with illness, like several others in his team, for the past three days.
The defeat will hurt and gnaw at Seixas — a scarcely believable fact for the youngest rider to finish in the top 10 for over a century. But when he looks back, Seixas will reflect on the improbability of the yellow jersey, and likely the greatest rider of all time, being pressed into domestique duties in a bid to resist his challenge.
“I tried to be stronger than usual and, in the end, I blew up,” said Seixas. “But that’s what we’d agreed with the team. We had nothing to lose.”
Yellow and white jersey, Pogačar and Del Toro, embrace as they cross the line on stage 20 (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)
And so to Carapaz, the most attacking rider in the race, who will surely see off Simmons, Baptiste Veistroffer, and Tom Pidcock to win the super combativity award on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday.
The battle for polka dots raged throughout the race — with Spanish ProTeam Caja Rural securing the jersey in emotional circumstances through Alex Molenaar in the Tour’s opening days, before first Alex Baudin, and then Paret-Peintre, battled to wrest the jersey from Pogačar’s grasp.
Carapaz knows he comes on strongest in the final week of Grand Tours; though faster than Paret-Peintre up the climbs, he lacks the Frenchman’s raw kick. His solution was to ride at a frightening pace from the outset of stages, hoping to shed his rival from his back wheel — an approach that rewarded him with king of the mountains points throughout the Tour’s final week.
After winning at Orcières Merlette on Thursday, Carapaz let an opportunity on Alpe d’Huez slip away the next day, hauled in by Pogačar in the closing kilometers. Many riders would have accepted taking a stage and the polka-dot jersey, but Carapaz’s fable is the paradigm of the man unafraid to fail.
He unashamedly pursued stages and jerseys over the lower placings on GC — for him, it was clear that 15th place and a stage win would be better than seventh place without one. Several other riders could follow his lead, and in the end Carapaz has secured a top 10 finish anyway.
This Tour may have begun with yellow being decided in the race’s first week but featured arguably the most thrilling minor classification competitions of the decade. It is details that make a race, and this edition of La Grande Boucle was crafted with an artist’s eye.