Defending champion Team Emirates-XRG’s Pogacar out to bury ghosts in final Tour de France week

UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s Tadej Pogacar is riding not just for the yellow jersey on the Tour de France, but also to bury the ghosts of the past.

As the 2025 Tour de France heads into its final and most punishing mountain stages, the defending champion is about to tackle climbs where he cracked or struggled before.

The Mont Ventoux and Col de la Loze await again. But this time, things feel different.

“I’m almost confident to say the route was designed to scare me,” Pogacar said with a smile on Monday.

“But I always look at it as a race situation. I actually like all of these climbs.”

This year, he has already won at Hautacam, where his Tour hopes vanished in 2022 when he was beaten by chief rival Jonas Vingegaard, who ended up 2:10 behind the Slovenian.

Pogacar is 4:13 ahead of the Dane in the general classification as he marches towards a fourth Tour title.

In his sixth campaign, Pogacar speaks with the assurance of a man determined to make peace with painful memories.

“Col de la Loze, for me, is one of the hardest climbs I’ve ever done,” he conceded. “I’m not looking for revenge. I just want to have better legs than those days in the past.”

In 2023, Pogacar experienced what he then called the ‘worst day’ of his life on a bike when he cracked in the ascent of the Col de la Loze, effectively losing the Tour to Vingegaard.

While the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider appears firmly in control, Pogacar knows better than anyone that one bad day can change everything.

Although Vingegaard has suffered two rare off days, he insists he is not out of contention.

“I do think I can win it. Of course, it looks very hard now - it’s a big gap,” the Dane said. “But normally my strength is in the third week. We have to attack.”

Vingegaard, however, has no illusions about the challenge ahead.

“The biggest difference is my two off days, where I lost most of the time,” he said. “But I don’t think the gap is as big as it looks. I know that’s not my level - I can do a lot better than that.

“I’m also willing to sacrifice second to try to achieve first.”

Visma-Lease a Bike’s sports director Grischa Niermann underlined the urgency of the mission.

“It’s four minutes - you don’t make that up with an attack in the last 500 metres,” Niermann said. “For that to happen, we need to see a weakness in Tadej. So far, he hasn’t shown one. But the Tour is over only when we reach Paris.”

Visma-Lease a Bike, however, seem to have lost the collective power that made them a formidable squad in 2022 and 2023, when Vingegaard won his two Tour titles.

“They tend to overtrain their riders and after two or three years, they’re completely empty,” a senior official in another Tour team said.

“They have plans, but don’t have the capacities to execute them. They should be more humble.”

Pogacar is ready for anything that might come at him.

“We’re ready for a fight with everybody,” he said. “Especially with Jonas.”

Meanwhile, heading into the final week of the Tour de France, emerging German star Florian Lipowitz is third in the overall standings and the highest-ranked rider under 25 in the world’s greatest bike race.

The 24-year-old from the Red Bull Bora team is not only the new face of cycling in his homeland, but also the new face standing alongside the likes of reigning Tour champion Pogacar and Vingegaard on the big-race podiums.

Lipowitz climbed to third in the rankings on Saturday, the day when double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel pulled out during the gruelling Tourmalet stage.

Having made the podium at both Paris-Nice and the Criterium du Dauphine this year, he was described by Pogacar, who met him in a lift at a team hotel, as “a nice guy, very cool, and really strong on a bike.”

The shy rider from southern German had an unusual route into cycling, coming to the sport from biathlon, a sport in which his brother Philipp was junior world champion.

Agencies