All Things 2025 Tour de France

FinnGopher said:

Ben Healy with a surprising ride today. I always like watching the ride up Mont Ventoux. The average grade for the incline is 8% and the climb is for nearly 9 miles.
No doubt the nation of France is celebrating today's stage winner.

Click to expand...

Surprised Healy couldn't hold on for the Stage win, which would have been HUGE for US-based team EF-Education. Still a strong showing. Good for a Frenchman to win a Stage though.

How great Pogacar is, historically great, is really overshadowing just how good of a TDF Vingegaard is having. Visma has done some questionable shit and odd strategy during the Tour so far but it looked like their strategy today was absolutely perfect, and they still couldn't launch Jonas past Pogacar.

Lipowitz from Red Bull-Bora continues to impress, increasing his cushion in the White jersey competition, although 22-year old Oscar Onley isn't letting up one bit. Love seeing the young riders at least be competitive. Those two are going to be going at it for a while.

My legs were aching just watching today's ride. This ride was just ridiculous. Ben O'Connor was fantastic, but Onley and Roglic also made some noise. It will be interesting to see if Lipowitz can hold that third spot into Paris.

Well, you don't hear this every day. Tomorrow's stage, Stage 19, of the TDF to be shortened, because..... well, cows...

"Stage 19 of the Tour de France has been shortened due to the ‘distress of farmers’ after a herd of cows was slaughtered on Friday’s original route.

The cattle were culled after an outbreak of contagious nodular dermatitis was discovered in a herd on the slopes of the Col des Saisies, which was scheduled to be the second categorised climb of the stage.

As a result, the Col des Saisies will now be omitted from the parcours, with the stage being shortened from 129.9km to 95km as a result. The race will also start one hour later than planned, now becoming the shortest road stage of the Tour for several years.

Ogie Ogilthorpe said:

Well, you don't hear this every day. Tomorrow's stage, Stage 19, of the TDF to be shortened, because..... well, cows...

Click to expand...

It has happened before in sports, but a different sport.

wisconsin almost had to cancel a football game in 1987 when a herd of cows stampeded the field.

This herd was later identified as the wisconsin cheerleading squad, and the game did go on but was delayed, due to the manure clean up.

Pretty good race shaping up for both 3rd place on the podium and the White jersey between Florian Lipowitz from Red Bull-Bora and Oscar Onley from Picnic PostNL; Lipowitz holding just a 22 second advantage. Lipowitz did not race a very smart race yesterday, going out in front of the group on his own, doing so much work for so long, then kind of blowing up on the final climb.

Roglic out in front early this morning, maybe trying to shake things up a little bit; he sits in 5th, and 1:48 off the podium spot of his teammate Lipowitz. That's a lot to make up but Roglic is an experienced rider and it's been a long tour. Not inconceivable that Roglic overtakes both Onley and Lipowitz but Onley has looked just really solid for the whole tour, no signs of breaking.

EDIT: Wow. So much for Roglic. Dropping like a rock, already over 5 minutes behind the Yellow jersey group. With 5 miles of climbing to go

For a moment it looked like Onley was going to move past Lipowitz, but now the four best in this tour are in a row.
Arensman is still 25 seconds ahead with 2 and a half miles to go. Can the yellow group catch him?

Weird finish. The 4 chasers looked a little indifferent, resolved to where they were going to finish in the final GC rankings. Thought Pogacar might make a run at the Stage win, but he didn't, and I have to say at the finish line he actually did look tired.

Incredible Tour for Lipowitz and Onley, and even so for Gall, Johannessen and Vauquelin.

And honestly it was a great, great TDF for Vingegaard, he distanced the rest of the field by 7 minutes; it will just go down that he got beat by almost 4.5 minutes by probably the greatest to ever get on a bike. Tough deal.

With two Stages left, all the jerseys seem pretty much set;

Yellow - Pogacar
Green - Milan (Yay, TREK!!!)
KOM - Pogacar
White - Lipowitz

I almost never watch Sunday's final Stage in the TDF and I'm not sure this year will be any different. It's really just everyone going through the motions until a bunch sprint finish. Not that exciting to me really.

Because of watching a number of tours, I have told my wife that if we go to France we can quickly leave Paris and head to various areas that I have seen via the tour. Man made stuff is not nearly as interesting to me as the land and geography of France. Show me the coastline, the grain fields, and the mountain streams and I will love France. Put me in Paris and I will feel confined by brick and steel.

Anyone watching the 2026 edition of the Tour?

My goodness Stage 6 was one for the ages. Was the Tour won on that stage? (Being vague for those who may not be caught up to today's Stage 7.

FinnGopher said:

Anyone watching the 2026 edition of the Tour?

My goodness Stage 6 was one for the ages. Was the Tour won on that stage? (Being vague for those who may not be caught up to today's Stage 7.

Click to expand...

I've been watching every day. Good grief, Pogacar is just on such an entirely different level than everyone else, it's almost depressing.

Coming into the tour, the word was that he was better than ever but we were also hearing Vingegaard was as strong as he's ever been so I thought MAYBE we would have a good race. Vingegaard does look really good and after just one week he's already got 45 seconds on the next spot on the podium but damn...

For Pogacar to already have a 2:42 lead after just one week, that's just ridiculous. He's not just securing his name as the best to ever get on a bike, he's not far from becoming one of the more dominant athletes in ANY sport.

The race for 3rd on the podium is still a good race with 5 guys separated by just 30 seconds so I'm going to keep watching every day (although the sprint days are boring to me).

You never know. These athletes are just so good that one bad day for Pogacar (sick, crash, dead legs) and it's a whole new race. That obviously happened several years ago when Pogacar had one bad day and it was enough for Vingegaard to put enough time into him to win the Tour.

Ogie Ogilthorpe said:

I've been watching every day. Good grief, Pogacar is just on such an entirely different level than everyone else, it's almost depressing.

Coming into the tour, the word was that he was better than ever but we were also hearing Vingegaard was as strong as he's ever been so I thought MAYBE we would have a good race. Vingegaard does look really good and after just one week he's already got 45 seconds on the next spot on the podium but damn...

For Pogacar to already have a 2:42 lead after just one week, that's just ridiculous. He's not just securing his name as the best to ever get on a bike, he's not far from becoming one of the more dominant athletes in ANY sport.

The race for 3rd on the podium is still a good race with 5 guys separated by just 30 seconds so I'm going to keep watching every day (although the sprint days are boring to me).

You never know. These athletes are just so good that one bad day for Pogacar (sick, crash, dead legs) and it's a whole new race. That obviously happened several years ago when Pogacar had one bad day and it was enough for Vingegaard to put enough time into him to win the Tour.

Click to expand...

Pogacar has a better team this year with Del Toro sitting third. Pogacar will have to do something stupid to lose this thing. That climb on stage 6 was just freakishly good and the insanity of the descent down was harrowing.

Unless Pogacar gets hurt, there is no one who will catch him. He destroyed the field again today.
The question now is "Who gets third?" Del Torro looked vulnerable today. The young Frenchman, Seixas, is the hope of France, less than 30 seconds behind Del Torro. Evanpoel and Ayuso are also right there.

FinnGopher said:

Unless Pogacar gets hurt, there is no one who will catch him. He destroyed the field again today.
The question now is "Who gets third?" Del Torro looked vulnerable today. The young Frenchman, Seixas, is the hope of France, less than 30 seconds behind Del Torro. Evanpoel and Ayuso are also right there.

Click to expand...

Actually, the chase for 2nd on the podium isn't exactly etched in stone just yet. There's now just a 1:08 gap between Vingegaard in 2nd and Florian Lipowitz in 6th, and Isaac Del Toro only 24 seconds behind Lipowitz; a total of 1:32 separating 2nd from 7th place

Yes, it's more than likely that Vingegaard retains his typical form and creates a gap between himself and the pack racing for 3rd on the final podium but Damn, it's not a foregone conclusion.

At some point you just run out of superlatives for Pogacar; today was pretty dominant, again. He's simply the best that has ever gotten on a bicycle in the history of the sport. When he put the hammer down today and NOBODY even thought about trying to stay on his wheel, with so many KM left in today's race.... frightening

I really like Remco, but it just doesn't seem like he's well-suited for the 3-week Grand Tours and major summit finish mountain stages. I wasn't much of a fan of Ayuso before, but he's riding for Lidl-Trek now and I'm a Trek guy so I can't root AGAINST him. I like the kid Lipowitz, he seems like arguably one of the better climbers in this pack racing for the podium.

The young phenom, Seixas, has GREATNESS in front of him but at 19 yrs old it's going to be really hard for him to compete on the biggest stage THIS year I think. Del Toro is in that group as well, young and with a great future, but he's probably waiting his turn as Pogacar's top lieutenant in this tour