Tadej Pogačar Wins a Record-Equalling Fifth Tour de France, With an Alpe d'Huez Record Along the Way

Cycling is a sport this column hasn't touched yet — Pogačar's 2026 Tour, five stage wins and a 29-year-old climb record broken, is as good a place to start as any.

By Miles Ashworth · 27 Jul 2026 · 1 min read · United Kingdom edition

Tadej Pogačar at the 2026 Tour de France. Photo: Kiril Simeonovski, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Slovenia's Tadej Pogačar won the 2026 Tour de France by more than six minutes over Remco Evenepoel, taking five individual stage wins along the way — a result that ties the record for Tour titles held by cycling's biggest names.

The stage wins included a genuine record: Pogačar rode Alpe d'Huez, one of the Tour's most famous and most-watched climbs, in 35 minutes 27 seconds — breaking a time that had stood since Marco Pantani set it in 1997, effectively an entire generation of climbers ago. He also beat his own fastest time up the Col du Tourmalet, going 43:12 against the 45:32 he'd set with Jonas Vingegaard back in 2023.

Across his career he now has 26 Tour stage wins in total, nine behind Mark Cavendish's all-time record — a target that's a completely different kind of number (Cavendish's wins came almost entirely on flat sprint stages; Pogačar's are winning mountains, time trials and everything between).

Cycling hasn't come up in this column before, and a Tour like this — a dominant overall win, a decades-old climb record gone, and a career stage-win tally now within real sight of the sport's most famous number — is exactly the kind of result worth breaking that streak for.