Tadej Pogacar woke up in Paris on Monday as the fastest and the youngest cyclist to win five Tours de France. The 27-year-old Slovene took his fifth overall victory on the Champs Élysées on Sunday evening in a thrilling final stage won by Mathieu van der Poel.
Pogacar is level with Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin and he is expected to continue racing in pursuit of a record-breaking sixth win.
“When it’s not fun any more, that’s when he will stop,” his mother, Marjeta, said. Asked how long her son might continue at his current level, she replied: “Maybe 10 years – I don’t know, we’ll see.”
The French media were, broadly, supportive of Pogacar’s success, with L’Équipe lauding his membership of the “club of five”, while Le Figarodescribed him as “untouchable, implacable and unbending”.
Pogacar’s CV is indeed untouchable. His record of victories is arguably more complete than Merckx’s, with only Paris-Roubaix and the Vuelta a España, which starts in Monaco on 22 August, still to be won.
The stats reveal just how dominant a Tour champion he has been. Over the 16,911km he has ridden during his five wins, he spent almost 9,500km in the yellow jersey. Given he took the lead in his first Tour win, in 2020, on the penultimate day, that is extraordinary.
Pogacar was the youngest of the five‑time winners to take the title and achieved his successes in just under 404 hours of racing; it took Anquetil almost 613. Pogacar’s average speed, 41.99kmh, was faster than any other five-time winner and he has won more mountain stages. These figures reflect changes in technology, equipment and athlete ability, allied to shorter stages, increased rest days and the diminishing number of time trials in the Tour.
While Pogacar and his team thrived, with Isaac del Toro joining his team leader on the Paris podium by finishing third, others plumbed the depths. Their dominant UAE Emirates XRG team won €832,750 (about £712,000) in prize money, while the Picnic PostNL team won €12,770.
French cyclists had a mixed experience. For only the third time there were no home stage wins, but three French riders – Paul Seixas, Lenny Martinez and Jordan Jegat – finished in the top 10.
Seixas represents the future for the home nation but the 19‑year‑old rider, who began the Tour recovering from a crash in June and nursing a cold, was disappointed to finish fourth in the general classification. “I’d hoped to make the podium in Paris as there wasn’t much between me and Del Toro,” he said. “But between myself and Pogacar, it’s a world apart.
“But it’s motivating and inspiring. It will make me work harder. I’ve a concrete vision of what I need to do, to get closer to my dream of winning the Tour.”
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Pogacar is expected to confirm that he will start the Vuelta, while the future plans of his longstanding rival Jonas Vingegaard, who crashed out of the Tour on the day he was visited by doping control at 2am, remain unclear.
The nocturnal doping controls subjected to both riders by the International Testing Agency provoked intense speculation, although no results have been made known.
However, Le Figaro, while acknowledging Pogacar’s achievement, captured the climate that still surrounds any serial winner, saying that credibility for the Tour and for Pogacar is a “challenge greater than any record”.
