Tour de France 2026 ***Spoilers***

[No Ta Doctor]

Did Jonas attempt to challenge Pog.
Must have missed that bit.

Yes, I think you must have. I'll await your alternative interpretation of why Jonas was pulling a bunch of podium hopefuls around France even though they weren't contributing, why he went to the front on Le Markstein and why he had his team lined out pacing toward the foot of Plateau de Solaison when he crashed out. I'm sure it'll make interesting reading

 

[No Ta Doctor]

Wow, Picnic won €12. That's almost enough for a mars bar each.

. Yes, I know

To be fair, even €12 feels a bit generous. As @DeadCalm pointed out on the Last WT Team to win / Just how bad are Picnic? thread

Pavel Bittner's 95 points (25 for 11th on stage 7, 70 for 5th on stage 8) were the only UCI points Team Picnic PostNL scored in the 2026 TDF. It's pitiful, really.

The real shocker is INEOS only earning €27K of course. Picnic were awful, but INEOS only earning about twice as much, with all that budget?

 

[Dorset Boy]

If you remove the Danish red tinted glasses for a moment, I'm not sure Jonas actually challenged Pog at all.
First slight incline and Pog puts the power down, Jonas was gapped and never got close again.

It's a huge shame Jonas crashed out but honestly, he never looked like getting close and his second place certainly wasn't certain, as a number of people commented. He looked cooked mid way through the Tour.

With his wife's concerns about his injuries, I could see him calling it quits. But for Pog he would have been a 5 time winner, but has an exceptional GT palmares. Shame he's never given the one dayers a go.

 

[phreak]

Anyone think Jonas will bother again? Only so many times he can hope Pog is having a bad day.
Those who think Carapaz should have waited need to stay on Zwift. Jonas crashing at 60km to go warrants a lull in the proceedings but not someone falling off at 4km to go

When was the last time Pogacar had a bad day? 2023? He was obviously very good in 2020 and 2021, but since those two defeats by Vingegaard, he's been on another planet, not just at the Tour but all year round. In those three years, he's obviously won the Tour three times, but the Giro, 8 monuments (and he's got to be the heavy favourite for Lombardia again), 2 Worlds (and again, he's got to be the heavy favourite), 7 other classics, and a handful of 1-week races. In that time, he's been on the podium in practically 60% of the days he's put a number on.

 

[phreak]

The winnings table, in Euros, but helpfully with Danish Kroner also included so you don't need to work out the conversion

1	UAE Team Emirates - XRG	832.750 €	6.203.988 kr.
2	Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe	288.160 €	2.147.792 kr.
3	Lidl - Trek	204.870 €	1.526.272 kr.
4	Decathlon CMA CGM Team	165.530 €	1.233.699 kr.
5	EF Education - EasyPost	124.160 €	925.792 kr.
6	Alpecin - Premier Tech	87.840 €	653.328 kr.
7	Bahrain - Victorious	86.820 €	646.899 kr.
8	Team Visma | Lease a Bike	71.210 €	530.515 kr.
9	Soudal Quick-Step	65.810 €	489.295 kr.
10	Uno-X Mobility	45.660 €	340.677 kr.
11	Team Jayco AlUla	44.020 €	327.749 kr.
12	XDS Astana Team	39.920 €	297.224 kr.
13	NSN Cycling Team	37.100 €	276.395 kr.
14	Lotto Intermarché	35.690 €	265.401 kr.
15	Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team	31.350 €	233.558 kr.
16	TotalEnergies	23.920 €	178.204 kr.
17	Netcompany INEOS	23.760 €	177.072 kr.
18	Movistar Team	18.790 €	140.376 kr.
19	Tudor Pro Cycling Team	16.760 €	124.262 kr.
20	Cofidis	15.440 €	115.528 kr.
21	Groupama - FDJ United	14.700 €	109.515 kr.
22	Caja Rural - Seguros RGA	13.570 €	101.697 kr.
23	Team Picnic PostNL	12.770 €	95.137 kr.

Shows just how poor the Tour was for Ineos. Sad to see Movistar down there as well. Maybe that's a reflection of Spanish cycling as a whole? "Only" 29 Spaniards at World Tour teams, which feels very low, especially as Movistar have over half of them. I'm sure there would be double that number when I was growing up.

 

[matticus]

If you remove the Danish red tinted glasses for a moment, I'm not sure Jonas actually challenged Pog at all.
First slight incline and Pog puts the power down, Jonas was gapped and never got close again.

er ... you do know that not all challenges are succesful. Right?

 

[M.R.M]

1. If Jonas wants to truly compete, he should go to the Tour for the rest of his career and try.
2. If it's a question about Jonas' legacy, he should try to do the Giro-Vuelta double every year for the rest of his career, because in 10 years time, people will only tally up the total wins and having 3-5 GT's more will make a bigger difference in cementing him as an all time great.

 

[phreak]

1. If Jonas wants to truly compete, he should go to the Tour for the rest of his career and try.
2. If it's a question about Jonas' legacy, he should try to do the Giro-Vuelta double every year for the rest of his career, because in 10 years time, people will only tally up the total wins and having 3-5 GT's more will make a bigger difference in cementing him as an all time great.

Will they though? If Pogacar retired tonight, he'd have one more Grand Tour win than Roglic. Heck, Vingegaard is currently level with Roberto Heras. I think we all know who the better cyclists are out of those pairings.

 

[wakemalcolm]

Will they though? If Pogacar retired tonight, he'd have one more Grand Tour win than Roglic. Heck, Vingegaard is currently level with Roberto Heras. I think we all know who the better cyclists are out of those pairings.

We'll never know. If Bobby Heras hadn't spent his best years towing an asterisk round France, he might have achieved much more.

 

[Dogtrousers]

Looking at the prize money ...

Offhand, I'm surprised to see Quickstep as low as 9th despite three stage wins from Merlier. It must be because the prize money is skewed to the GC and consistency as they didn't do much else.

And what did Bahrain do to get 7th with no stages at all? Just a single second place. I guess that's all down to Lenny wheelsucking his way to being there or thereabouts quite often and getting 5th on GC.

Lidl are third with a single stage win because Mads tore the prize money safe open with his bare hands and stuffed his pockets full

 

[BrumJim]

Seems to show that XDS Astana were quite clever in getting the prize money, whereas Movistar and Netcompany were aiming for the big prizes and missing.

 

[mrushton]

If you remove the Danish red tinted glasses for a moment, I'm not sure Jonas actually challenged Pog at all.
First slight incline and Pog puts the power down, Jonas was gapped and never got close again.

It's a huge shame Jonas crashed out but honestly, he never looked like getting close and his second place certainly wasn't certain, as a number of people commented. He looked cooked mid way through the Tour.

With his wife's concerns about his injuries, I could see him calling it quits. But for Pog he would have been a 5 time winner, but has an exceptional GT palmares. Shame he's never given the one dayers a go.

One day races not his thing. He is a stage racer and a good one but unless his hearts in it he might as well retire. Can't keep doing the best condition/legs/plan and nauseum.Do we need a swallow his pride thread? I take it he won't be at the Vuelta

 

[Dogtrousers]

So, what made the 2026 tour really special? What was it that made Christian Prudhomme's chest swell with pride? What really drew the fans to the roadside?

Why, it was the 10th Tour in succession to have featured Guillaume Martin, of course! That's a cause for celebration!

Sadly for fans of le Grimpeur Philosophe he was 31st, his lowest placing apart from his 2022 DNF.

But, all the same, hurrah!

 

[Pross]

Quick rewind to stage 20

Bravo to Seixas for his final roll of the dice. It didn't work, in fact it backfired, but he gave it a go to see if he could take some time out of del Toro. He could have just sat on, probably not lost as much, if any, time and ended up in the same place. I think he knew he had nothing left, but he gave it a shot.

Also ... I don't normally read much cycling stuff on the internet apart from here. For some reason I had a look around elsewhere after stage 20 and there were LOADS of people arguing that Carapaz was dreadfully unsportsmanlike for not waiting for Kuss. Also Remco was behaving dreadfully by overtaking Kuss (the true moral victor) at the finish. So that's why I don't read much elsewhere.

They’re people who came to cycling in the 00s and believed all the stories of derring do trotted out by the likes of Rapha and Rouleur magazine. There seems to have been a confusion between not starting racing when an opponent has a mishap and stopping racing when it happens.

 

[No Ta Doctor]

If you remove the Danish red tinted glasses for a moment, I'm not sure Jonas actually challenged Pog at all.
First slight incline and Pog puts the power down, Jonas was gapped and never got close again.

As I said above:

Jonas was the only rider attempting to challenge Pogacar

He was literally the only rider other than Pogacar trying to win the yellow jersey, rather than compete for the podium. This isn't rose tinted or in any way controversial. Whether you think he was going to be successful or not is irrelevant.

We've spent several seasons now bemoaning "group two syndrome", riders that give up the chase and settle for second as soon as Pog gets away, and yet the one rider who consistently doesn't do that seems to catch flak for not being able to beat him.


AS for the general debate re the second place - Jonas finished second to Pog on two of Pog's stage wins before he abandoned. On the other two he towed the people who finished in front of him to the line. He finished fourth, with the same time, in the Del Toro stage win, pipped by Remco to the last bonus seconds.

Pogacar smashed the record for the Tourmalet by over two minutes (45:35, set by him and Vingegaard in '23), but his time of 43:12 was only 30 seconds faster than Vingegaard. The others were almost a minute down on Vingegaard's time of 43:42, coming over the summit at 44:30. "Cooked" Vingegaard became the second fastest to ever climb the Tourmalet. The real damage that stage wasn't done on the Tourmalet, but on the 1 v 1 descent and long draggy climb that followed, where Jonas lost just over 2 minutes and was visibly tiring.

None of that suggests to me that a second place was in jeopardy, though Remco did come into the race well later. I understand that we hold Jonas to higher standards - he's a generational GT talent that's just misfortunate to be racing at the same time as an absolute alien - but let's remember when we're doing so.