Tour De France: Tadej Pogacar Dominates Race For Record Tying Fifth Win

Tadej Pogacar is in rare company after winning a record-tying fifth Tour de France. Only four others are credited with the achievement: Belgian Eddy Merckx, Spaniard Miguel Indurain and Frenchmen Bernard Hinault and Jacques Anquetil. (American Lance Armstrong stood on the winners podium seven times, but was stripped of his titles in 2012 after a doping investigation.)

Pogacar, who rides for team UAE Team Emirates-XRG, dominated the race nearly from the start, taking the yellow jersey in the sixth stage and holding it for the final 15. His margin of victory this morning was a comfortable 6 minutes, 26 seconds.

The 27-year-old Solvenian is the youngest to win the race five times and, if he wants them, looks to have many chances ahead to break the record. Some may point to the fact that the man who beat Pogacar in 2022 and 2023, Danish racer Jonas Vingegaard, broke his collarbone in a crash in stage 15, which helped clear the way for the Slovenian to be first in Paris this year. But Pogacar was already four-and-a-half minutes ahead.

After the penultimate stage of the grueling race, Pogacar did not sound sanguine about his prospects for future Tour wins.

“I definitely will not be doing this for too much long time, I think,” he told European broadcaster TNT Sports. 

Here in the U.S., NBC Sports will presented three weeks of live coverage of the Tour on NBC, Peacock and NBCSN. It concluded with today’s final stage on NBC.