‘We Flipped the Tables.’ Tadej Pogacar Gets Sweet Tour de France Revenge

Tadej Pogacar celebrates his victory in the 12th stage of the Tour de France.

Hautacam, France

The careful thing to do is remind you that the 2025 Tour de France isn’t over—that there’s more than a week and several difficult stages left before the finish in Paris, and any declarations about the winner of this bike race are premature and probably irresponsible.

Again, that’s the careful thing to do.

Here’s the fun thing to do, and what everyone’s thinking on the ground: Tadej Pogacar is going to win the Tour de France. Again.

You could feel it on the mountaintops Thursday and Friday, as the three-time winner from Slovenia soared in the Pyrenees, blasting away his competition to win two consecutive stages and build a 4 minute, 7 second overall lead on his closest rival, Jonas Vingegaard.

Crazy often happens in bike racing, but something really crazy will have to happen for Pogacar to relinquish the yellow jersey as race leader.

Because in bike racing, there’s Tadej Pogacar, and there’s everyone else.

Nobody disputes this anymore. Not even Vingegaard, who I watched lurch across the finish line Thursday atop the Hautacam, pale and shaken, like a man who’d seen a headless ghost ride away from him atop a carbon fiber Colnago.

Vingegaard, 28, has won two Tours–in 2022 and 2023, humbling Pogacar both times. He recovered to post a strong time trial Friday, but he’s one looking humbled now, and not just because of that odd aerodynamic helmet he wore that looked like a portable pizza oven.

Vingegaard’s super team, Visma Lease a Bike, has made baffling choices–controlling the race when they didn’t need to control the race, burning away surrogate teammates who would have been helpful to Vingegaard on the closing climbs.

But that’s tactics, fine print to squabble over. The reality is that Pogacar is too good.

“I feel at the best moment of my career,” the Slovenian said after the Hautacam finish.

In other words, he knows.

At 26, Pogacar owns a résumé that eclipses anyone in cycling history besides the Belgian all-timer Eddy Merckx. He’s already won three Tours, the Giro d’Italia, the current World Championship, plus loads of one-day classics like the Tour of Flanders (twice), the Giro di Lombardia (four), Strade Bianche (three), and I’m going to stop, because we’ll be here all day.

He does it all. Whereas Vingegaard is a Tour de France specialist, every training choice geared toward winning in July, Pogacar is a cycling polymath who races basically anything from winter through autumn and would need to be talked out of a drag race with a train and a horse.

Such swashbuckling has made him a superstar. In April, Pogacar raced the danger-filled Paris-Roubaix even though everyone warned him a bad tumble on the cobblestones could cost him his Tour defense. He did tumble—which cost him only the win, as the race had been whittled down to him and the Dutch flyer Mathieu van der Poel.

Pogacar looks back at rival Jonas Vingegaard during the 12th stage.

Pogacar crashed Wednesday and still flew up the mountains the next afternoon. It could have been bad: Pogacar was clipped by the wheel of another rider on the way into Toulouse, tumbling onto the pavement  at, I don’t know, mid-20-something miles per hour.

He was lucky: scrapes and a bike he was able to remount. He’s riding now with a web of bandages on his left elbow.

A certain scrappiness is part of the Pogi vibe. Pogacar’s been leading a generational rebuke to the dull, data-driven racing of the prior decade. Instead of staring at his bike computer and sticking to predetermined limits, Pogacar goes on instinct.  He races like he’s getting paid by the hour.

Pogacar crashed during the 11th stage on Wednesday.

He’s a hoarder, too; he wins stages he needs, and stages he doesn’t. Pogacar now has 21 Tour de France stage wins in his career, and it’s time to start asking if he’ll stick around to chase Mark Cavendish’s all-time record of 35, which recently surpassed Merckx’s 34.

It would be a spiritual reunification–Cavendish was a sprinting specialist, but Pogacar, like Merckx, is an all-around talent who can climb, sprint and knock elbows, and is closer to the romantic soul of the sport.

Can he be stopped? It isn’t looking good.

The week’s biggest revelation was the less than stellar support of Vingegaard’s Visma. Three years ago, in a Tour that wound up on this same climb, Vinegaard and his teammates spent days working an isolated Pogacar like a speed bag, making him chase repeated attacks, wearing him down.

Thursday, it was Pogacar’s Team UAE holding the numbers. After Visma riders like the American Matteo Jorgenson began falling away, it was Vingegaard alone, while Pogacar still had help.

“We flipped the tables from 2022,” Pogacar said, savoring revenge served three years cold.

Pogacar actually struck off on his own earlier than planned–he said his UAE teammate Jhony Narvaez attacked earlier on the Hautacam than expected, whereupon Pogacar bolted, too, leaving an unprepared Vingegaard behind.

This is classic Pogi, too: Maybe not exactly the right moment to go but, well, why not, sure, let’s do it.

He took time off Vingegaard every kilometer Thursday, putting considerable distance between himself and the field before Friday’s punchy mountain time trial, where he donned a far less eccentric helmet than his Visma nemesis— and dominated once more.

A final climbing stage Saturday in the Pyrenees follows, then a romp into the Alps before home to Paris.

Yes: there still is a lot of Tour de France left. But a promised rivalry has turned into a parade. Tadej Pogacar is the best cyclist in the world, and isn’t ready to give that up.