• Stages 1-10
• Stages 11-15
• Stages 16-21

I finished the general classification section of my middle week recap by yearning for a world where Pogacar’s limits might be exposed so that we could all begin to envisage some plausible if unlikely path to victory for another rider in some future year.

We didn’t really get that. On Stage 19, Jonas Vingegaard got a six-second time bonus while Pogacar got four. That was the only time the three-week battle for yellow didn’t entirely go the Slovenian’s way.

Something significant has happened though; something that may well deny Pogacar a Grand Tour victory.

Speaking in a brief press conference after this win, Pogacar said: “We were in the lead and we had quite a big gap, so we were comfortably in yellow. But yeah, I was tired in the last week.”

He was tired! It’s a thing that can actually happen to him! Crumbs of comfort there for his Tour rivals, but rather more than that in the medium-term. Pogacar is in fact so tired that he’s currently unsure whether he’ll actually start the Vuelta a Espana, as planned. Gotta be in it to win it, as they (annoyingly) say.

The sheer relentlessness of the racing in this Tour de France could therefore deny him victory… just not in this race.

The difference

The 2025 Tour showed us that while there are a few up-and-comers, this race is still Pogacar v Vingegaard. No-one else is close.

And even the Dane wasn’t that close. Peaks and troughs of form, he reckoned.

“I can agree that on some stages I have had the highest level that I have ever had and in other stages I have had the lowest level for many years for me.”

The most heartening performance therefore came from 22-year-old, Oscar Onley, who also delivered my favourite moment of the race.

Onley was dropped from the yellow jersey group near the top of the Col de la Madeleine on Stage 18. While it’s not too disastrous to be dropped near the top of a climb when it’s a summit finish, it’s a little more concerning when you still have to go down the other side and then up the 26.4km meandering sod that is the Col de la Loze.

The flipside to getting dropped so early is that you have time to catch up again. It’s just that riders who have been dropped typically aren’t well equipped to achieve that goal.

Here we saw the oh-so-visible benefits of teamwork. Warren Barguil had managed to stay with Onley, while Frank Van den Broek had been in a break that had just been caught. Together they steam-trained their man not merely back up to Pogacar, but straight past him.

After two and a half weeks dwelling on the race leader’s invincibility, it was a comical sight to see a group of riders overtake him at such a pace.

With a head start on the climb and the other riders’ stinging attacks for the most part already executed, Onley was able to finish fourth on the day, en route to fourth overall.

It was a promising debut from the Scot whose greatest strength might well be that he’s young enough that he’ll still be riding when Pogacar finally calls it a day.

RIP ITV’s cycling coverage

I’ve already expressed my crushing disappointment at the loss of ITV’s live coverage and in particular their highlights show, but it’s worth acknowledging that they did at least go out in style.

Throughout the race, they revisited any number of great features only tangentially related to the Tour de France. Highlights for me included the fleet of motorised profiteroles, the armada of pedalos and a big piece about Didi, the roadside devil and all of his inventions back home. I’m confident that actual racing highlights will still be accessible on free-to-air TV next year, but this is the stuff we’ll lose.

A word too for Gary Imlach, who found the most Gary Imlach way to bow out, describing the final stage in Paris as, “not so much the climax, as the cigarette afterwards,” while simultaneously claiming that he would refrain from stooping to anything so crass.

What’s next?

The Vuelta a Espana starts on August 23. Jonas Vingegaard will be there. I wouldn’t especially trust comments made straight after Stage 21 when fatigue is at its deepest, so Pogacar might well be too.

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• Stages 1-10
• Stages 11-15
• Stages 16-21

If there was a moment that summed up where we are in this race, it came ahead of Stage 13. Pogacar’s most credible rival was Jonas Vingegaard, but with a time trial up a mountain in prospect, the race leader had already significantly bested the Dane in both a time trial and up a mountain. 

Try mining that one for sporting uncertainty. Could he crash? Uphill, under no meaningful pressure from his rivals? Not likely. Might the fatigue of a long race start to tell? Well, the previously mentioned mountain superiority had come literally the day before, when everyone else had looked significantly wearier than him.

In the end, the result was what absolutely everyone expected it to be and Pogacar’s overall lead swelled to over four minutes.

There are of course no certainties in the Tour de France, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes afflicted by incredibly solid likelihoods. The race is most exciting when the rider with the advantage has shown some vulnerability, but Pogacar, this year, has expunged all of that. The chances that he might at some point not be the strongest rider in this race seem slim anyway, but even if he were to suffer a third week drop-off in form, his current margin is now so great he’d probably still win anyway.

Not that Pogacar has faded much in recent grand tour victories. Getting progressively more tired seems to be out of fashion these days.

So what are we left with? That something like that might happen? That there might be a world where his limits are exposed and we can begin to envisage some plausible if unlikely path to victory for another rider in some future year?

As hooks go, it’s not a corker.

What else?

The big story of the race from a UK perspective has been 22-year-old Oscar Onley from Kelso. After finishing fourth in the Tour Down Under last year, he’s racked up a load of top 10 finishes in shorter stage races and then translated that into a strong first week at this year’s Tour, hanging with Pogacar and Vingegaard even when the group thinned to just five or six riders.

Those early feats involved conquering only hills rather than mountains, so it was interesting to see how he fared in the Pyrenees. Fifth place on the first big stage to Hautacam suggests that regardless of how things go for him this coming week, he has it in him to contest the Tour de France. British fans have been spoilt this last decade, but that really is quite the thing. Given all his future feats won’t be on ITV, I’m calling him Oscar Onley Seen On Pay TV.

What’s next?

The final week is the Alpine week, but before that there’s an ascent of Mont Ventoux on Stage 16 (Tuesday). This is always a slightly weird stage because the Giant of Provence’s 15.7km at 8.8% comes not after a day of climbing, but after a 150km dash across the flat, which can really mess with riders’ legs.

Wednesday looks like a sprint stage and then we’re in the thick of it. Stage 18 brings three hors catégorie (beyond categorisation) climbs: the Col du Glandon and the Col de la Madeleine before a summit finish up the less silly side of the Col de la Loze (which is still 26.4km at 6.5%).

This is followed on Friday by another beast of a stage with five climbs, two of which are HC. Again, it’s a summit finish – 19.1km at 7.7% to La Plagne.

Those look spectacular on paper, but Stage 20 through the Jura mountains on Saturday looks more intriguing. It’s one of those routes that’s awash with unmarked climbs, meaning you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen when.

The final stage in Paris on Sunday has a novelty: the new climb of Montmartre (1.1km at 5.9%) crowbarred into it three times to break up the race. Who knows how that’ll play out.

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• Stages 1-10
• Stages 11-15
• Stages 16-21

It’s not a great era for Team Breakaway, the informal and ever-changing team that forms on the road each morning with the shared mad goal of getting to the finish before the peloton.

Previous Tour de France winners, such as Chris Froome, were often happy to let a group of non-threatening riders get a few minutes ahead and contest the stage win among themselves. These days, either Tadej Pogacar sets his team to work chasing them, because he fancies the win himself, or Jonas Vingegaard asks his men to ride hard because they have this wild notion that the Dane can withstand a hard race better than his great rival.

Throw in a few sprint teams for the flat days and breakaway opportunities are few and far between.

So what do you do?

If you’re EF Education-Easypost, you go for it anyway, and ideally you do so with Ben Healy in the mix.

Step 1 involves convincing Tadej and Jonas that you aren’t going to steal the Tour de France from them. While Healy has been on the podium in hilly one-day classics, he doesn’t have much of a record competing in stage races, so that’s a reassurance in itself. He then shed three minutes or so in the Stage 5 time trial. From that point, he was seen as acceptable break fodder.

Step 2 involves targeting a day when the break might just stay away. These are typically days with a large number of climbs. On flat days, the bunch moves too quickly and when there are only one or two showpiece mountains, the overall contenders tend to be going full speed for too long. What you want is a climb early on to help you get away and tough roads throughout.

Step 3 is the hard bit. That involves actually getting into the break, working with your temporary allies for as long as it’s mutually beneficial and then picking the right moment to break those alliances. Also – small point – but you need to be a ferociously strong rider to accomplish all of that.

Stage 6 was the first of this year’s Tour that really stood out as a possibility: six categorised climbs with countless uncategorised ones in between. This resulted in the first two hours being undertaken at breakneck pace as everyone tried to execute the exact same plan.

The end result was that the eventual breakaway group comprised only riders who’d been able to withstand all of this. For the next hour-and-a-bit they all worked together to put some distance between themselves and the peloton. Then, with 40-odd kilometres to go, Healy set off on a nondescript stretch of road and the cohesion among the others ebbed sufficiently that he was never caught.

One stage win is a successful Tour de France if you’re a breakaway rider, but Healy again tried his luck across the eight classified climbs of Stage 10. At a certain point, while still accompanied by rivals, he realised his deficit to race leader Pogacar had been negated.

‘Why not try to lead the Tour de France for a bit?’ he thought. And so that’s what he set out to do, riding hard to retain his time advantage with few thoughts of conserving energy to contest the stage win (because leading overall is the bigger prize).

That decision was great news for his companions, even if it didn’t perhaps feel like it. Lenny Martinez, who is currently leading the King of the Mountains competition, rode so hard he developed a nose bleed. Apparently that’s a thing that can happen. What a sport.

Further ahead, demonstrating admirable nasal resilience, was this year’s Giro d’Italia winner Simon Yates, who had got in the break having already wilfully ceded 20-minutes to the main contenders to prove he had no designs on competing for the overall. Yates did his thing of biding his time and keeping a low profile before making the decisive move.

Will Ben Healy win the Tour de France?

Nope. Next week Healy will be repeatedly fighting to lead the Tour de France for one more day. That is a fine old goal and it’ll be fascinating to watch, but he will not be fighting to be the victor at the end of the three weeks. His best result thus far has been 27th, last year, almost two hours adrift.

At the same time, there’s always that proviso that we don’t really know what he’s capable of, because he’s never really tried to race every single stage before. Suddenly he has a reason to do so and now we’ll discover his limits – clearly, painfully and unequivocally.

You get this scenario every once in a while and it’s always very interesting. Thomas Voeckler was a breakaway specialist who got sucked into competing for the overall in 2011 after finishing second from the break on Stage 9. He held onto the lead through the Pyrenees and deep into the Alps and eventually finished fourth overall.

More recently, Julian Alaphilippe twice took the race lead in the 2019 Tour and fought hard to retain it over terrain that didn’t suit him. One of the fastest hill riders of the last decade, the Frenchman has never quite been able to hang with the best on longer mountain passes, but here he was forced to try. One day he was dropped but caught up again by descending like a lunatic. The next day you could see the effort, but it was all for naught. He finished fifth overall.

You don’t win the Tour de France like this, but by The Hammer of Thor Hushovd you can earn a lot of admiration. Good luck to Ben Healy for the (short) week ahead.

So who will win the Tour de France?

I’d love to offer you some intrigue; I’d love to float some additional contenders; but as things stand, it’s looking very much like Pogacar v Vingegaard again – same as it is every year.

That’s not bad though. At least there’s some doubt about which of them will win. We don’t always have that. The hilly terrain thus far has suited Pogacar far more than Vingegaard, whose major triumphs have tended to come on huge mountains, yet the Dane has not been meaningfully distanced (except in the time trial, where he unexpectedly surrendered over a minute).

He should find that encouraging given…

What’s next?

Bastille Day landing on a Monday means the first rest day was delayed so the first ‘week’ of this Tour actually extended to 10 days. That’s almost half the race. The second half will however be veeeeery different.

The most protracted climbs so far have been about 5km long and required not much more than a 10-minute effort. On Saturday, something much like that will be the easiest of four climbs, the most sizeable of which will be the Tourmalet (19km at 7.4%).

Before then, the riders will frolic through the vineyards on Wednesday (Stage 11), tackling a few short steep climbs. Thursday brings the first summit finish up Hautacam, where Vingegaard dropped Pogacar in 2022. Friday is a cronoscalata – a time trial to Peyragudes that’s roughly 600m of up in 10km of along.

The week finishes with some mid mountains on Stage 15, but there aren’t too many climbs in the closing kilometres, so that might actually be a quiet one with regards to the overall.

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In October it was announced that both live coverage and highlights of the Tour de France would be exclusive to Warner Brothers Discovery channels from 2026 to 2030 (and most likely beyond).

That brings to an end a 40-year run for the team that produced free-to-air highlights, first for Channel 4 and since 2001 for ITV and ITV4.

It is a big loss. In multiple ways.

The impact

We probably will still get free-to-air highlights. Warner Brothers (via TNT Sports and related Freeview channels, like Quest) already offer this for the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana, so there’s a template there.

However, speaking as someone who has written about cricket since 2006 – the year live coverage of that sport moved to Sky Sports – let us tell you that free-to-air highlights can only really staunch the bleeding.

Cricket isn’t what it was and, after this year (for UK viewers at least), the Tour de France will no longer be what it was either. Unavailability of live coverage unavoidably makes the event far less visible. You can’t negate that.

Maybe it’s not quite so bad for the Tour where each stage serves as a race in its own right. Grand tour highlights can be packaged in a more comprehensible and easy-to-digest way than a Test match, so they can actually be a preferred way of consuming the race for even die-hard fans.

It’s just that the Warner Brothers programme won’t be anywhere near as watchable as the ITV one, will it?

Spot the difference

ITV’s Tour de France higlights show has become, over the years, one of the all-time great sports programmes, conveying the scale, majesty and madness of the Tour de France in an unparalleled way.

One of the strengths of ITV’s coverage, and Channel 4’s before that, has been just how far from cycling they dared to turn their attention. The show as a whole has been tight and coherent, but it has always retained broader horizons, engineering room for interesting digression.

Returning after an ad break, the show routinely postpones the action in favour of a feature about something related to the race. They might tell you about some of the gear or the art of the time trial. They might give you some cycling history or tell you a bit about the day’s start or finish town. Perhaps they’ll cover the publicity caravan or the climate emergency or how vegan riders eat during the race. Maybe they’ll revisit an old doping scandal or tell you a bit about Panini stickers. In the last couple of years, they’ve run a regular segment fronted by a geologist.

When the sport basically boils down to three weeks of pedalling, this kind of breadth is welcome.

In contrast, one post-ad-break segment during TNT Sports coverage of this year’s Giro d’Italia saw the reporter standing on a hill attempting to describe how its gradients changed from start to finish – something that could be far more quickly and easily conveyed via some kind of graphic.

Their highlights show isn’t bad, but there’s a narrower focus and less ambition. It’s a pretty generic sports show really.

Conclusion

I don’t expect to lose my love of cycling when the ITV era draws to a close, but I do imagine that love will take on a different shape in the years to come. I think for many of us, our whole perception of the sport has been shaped by the way it has been covered, in this broad, discursive, open-minded way.

RIP ITV Tour de France highlights. You will be greatly missed.

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• Stages 1-9
• Stages 10-15
• Stages 16-21

On that day, scaling Mount Etna, Yates rode away from all the other favourites and took the race lead. Three days later, on another summit finish, he gained a few more seconds. 

Early the next week, he won a hilly stage, and at the end of it took a third stage win to give himself a two minute buffer going into the final week. You know how the final week of the Giro can be though and you also know that in 2018 Simon Yates did not win . 

That year the final week brought three successive summit finishes. Yates had proven himself the strongest climber, so if anything this seemed an opportunity to extend his lead. But this is the thing about the Giro. You can race for seconds over the first two weeks, but then suddenly the cumulative fatigue bites and riders start shipping minutes – or even tens of minutes. 

On Stage 18 Yates showed signs of tiredness and lost a few seconds from his lead. Stage 19 brought the Colle delle Finestre. While everyone remembers Chris Froome winning the race that day, it’s worth dwelling on exactly how Yates lost it, which was bit by bit by oh-bloody-hell. 

The Finestre is a brute of a climb. For one thing it takes an hour, which is very unusual for the pros. The lower slopes are steep; the middle part brings a comical number of hairpin bends, which are liable to tease you out of your rhythm; and then just to put the top hat on things, the surface turns to gravel towards the top. 

Yates had attacked often in the first two weeks and then the time trial that began the final week had really taken it out of him. He’d used a lot of energy. There was no chance to recover. Matter was beginning to decline the endless and wearying instructions doled out by mind. After doing a passable impression of a Giro contender on Stage 18, his body gave up the pretence and surrendered 39 minutes. 

Imagine that. After almost three weeks, you’re in the pink jersey and when you cross the finish line, you’re half-an-hour down. The results say it was a six-hour ride, but it’s easy to imagine how his perception of time would have twisted. The Finestre alone must have felt longer.

That’s the kind of experience that would stay with you. If you were Simon Yates and you saw the route for the 2025 Giro d’Italia with the Colle delle Finestre on Stage 20, you might think to yourself something like, “You know what, I’m not going to do too much sprinting for time bonuses in the first two and a half weeks. I think I’m going to try to keep just a little in reserve for that fiendish pigdog.”

The fiendish pigdog

All these allusions to needing to pace oneself and conserve energy might seem a little old fashioned in this era of riders dominating Grand Tours from start to finish, so let’s have a few quick facts.

Last year they went easy on the riders in a (succesful) bid to tempt Tadej Pogacar into taking part. The entire Giro route often brings in excess of 50,000m of climbing, but this dropped to 43,000m for 2024. This year, that was back up over 52,000m (with an extra 100km of distance thrown in for good measure).

That is a fair bit more tiring. Almost 25 per cent more climbing is highly likely to show in the final week – particularly the day after a stage that served up five climbs and 4,950m of elevation gain.

That stage – Stage 19 – finished with all the main contenders reduced to much the same steady-slog-to-the-finish pace. It was pretty obvious that someone was going to have an unhappy day on the Finestre the following afternoon. That person was not Simon Yates.

2019 Giro winner Richard Carapaz felt like he was in the best form and set about trying to drop Isaac del Toro at the foot of the climb, ordering his team to ride at a silly, unsustainable speed to make everyone unhappy.

This was partly successful. Everyone was definitely unhappy and del Toro was momentarily dropped, but Carapaz couldn’t create any serious distance.

In particular, he couldn’t create enough distance that Yates couldn’t calmly ride back up to the two of them a little way further up the climb. Then, having spent a couple of weeks conspicuously failing to attack and with no further mountain stages to come, Yates went on the offensive.

Who knows what energy his conservative riding up until then had saved him, but he had enough to deploy that one of those attacks eventually stuck.

Much has been made of the subsequent inaction of del Toro and Carapaz and how they repeatedly invited each other to chase, but honestly, they’d already chased a few times; it’s a long race – I think they were just cooked.

Yates had a 1m40s advantage over the top with only the gradual climb up to Sestriere to come. In that situation, there’s worse team-mates to have waiting for you up ahead than Wout van Aert.

Yates started the day 1m20s behind and finished it 4m ahead.

You can keep your bonus seconds.

What’s next?

The Critérium du Dauphiné starts next week and brings an abrupt cast change with Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel all due to be in action ahead of their Tour de France tilts.

Highlights of the race will be on ITV4, so I’ll be watching (if not reporting) on it, simply because there are only so many more chances to watch ITV cycling coverage with the rights having been whisked away from them for 2026 onwards. (All respect to the game efforts of everyone involved in the TNT Sports production, but I am genuinely pretty down about this development. The ITV show is inimitable and unsurpassed. More on this subject later in the year.)

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• Stages 1-9
• Stages 10-15
• Stages 16-21

If you compare last week’s top 10 to the updated version below, you’ll see not much has changed.

Isaac del Toro’s advantage is seven seconds larger and to a different person, but it’s still pretty trivial ahead of a day that will bring a summit finish and almost 5,000m of climbing.

The contenders have all spread out just a little bit more, but we’re not yet down to two or three obvious favourites (although, like I say, we might be by the time you read this).

Movers and shakers

Affronted by my suggestion that he’s the kind of rider who tends to hover around eighth place, Derek Gee’s on the way up having regained a minute.

Primoz Roglic is technically in the same position, but clearly on the way down (and possibly out) as he’s lost more time. He’s crashed three times now: once on the gravel, once in practice on his time trial bike and once in a mass pile-up.

I suppose there are other types of crash he could tick off, but with a lot of tired riding on mountain roads in the offing, it really would be best if he could avoid that.

What’s next?

Stage 16 (today) features four 10km-plus climbs with the finish line at the top of the last one. (It would be pretty weird if it were at the top of, say, the second one.)

Stage 17 (Wednesday) has just two such climbs, but one’s the 12.6km 7.6% Mortirolo and it’s hard to detect much flat elsewhere on the route, even outside the categorised climbs.

Stage 18 (Thursday) is probably for the sprinters or maybe a breakaway as there’s a bunch of hills in the middle.

Stage 19 (Friday) is really not what you want with Stages 16 and 17 in your mind and legs. Five climbs and 4,950m of elevation gain. Three of those climbs are over 15km long and none is gentle.

Stage 20 (Saturday) is just bare-faced cruelty. With Stages 16, 17 and 19 now banked and bodies at the limit, the peloton covers 100 relatively unremarkable miles before hitting the Colle delle Finestre.

The Colle delle Finestre is, quite simply, a bitch. It’s 18.5km long and averages 9.2%. Some of it’s gravel and there are 45 hairpins, including 30 in one 3km stretch.

Simon Yates will tell you what can happen when you’re feeling a bit tired on the Celle delle Finestre.

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• Stages 1-9
• Stages 10-15
• Stages 16-21

The first phase of this Giro is a peculiar thing when viewed as one part of the whole. It will have been either massively consequential or almost entirely irrelevant depending whether or not things have gone badly for any given rider. There’s been enough tough racing that some are out of the reckoning already, but those final stages loom figuratively and literally large given the sheer number of mountains they’ll bring.

While that means plentiful opportunities for early frontrunners to utterly implode, I’m not convinced it also opens opportunities to vault up the leaderboard. Not onto the podium anyway. Looking at the standings, it’s hard to identify too many convincing bolters lurking outside this top 10.

The likes of Thymen Arensman and Derek Gee have Grand Tour top 10 finishes to their names, but they’re not the kinds of riders you envisage tearing the race apart to make dramatic comebacks. Not to be unkind, but if one of them were in, say, eighth place, then you’d probably bet on him finishing eighth. They’re those sorts of riders.

What about Isaac del Toro?

First things first: hats off being called Isaac del Toro and hats off for being Mexican. That’s a great name and an interesting country of origin from a road cycling perspective.

If you haven’t yet tired of all this headwear removal, hats off for hanging with the top riders too. On Stage 9, when pre-race favourite Primoz Roglic suffered more of the crashes and punctures that so often seem to be his lot in life, del Toro took the race lead by heading out on his own across the white gravel roads of Tuscany. (Well, not quite on his own – Wout van Aert cadged a lift and nicked the stage win and a good proportion of the headlines. It was del Toro who did pretty much all the work to deliver that though.)

Here’s a great shot of him on one of the gravel sections.

Just a great, great time to be utilising one’s lungs to their maximal capacity.

That del Toro was in a position to go into the lead in that Stage 9 dust-up was down to having matched everyone on previous tough days, such as when he finished second on the summit finish on Stage 7.

Does that make him a legitimate contender? Well, a couple of years back he did win the Tour de l’Avenir, the under-25s race that has previously brought us the likes of Egan Bernal and Tadej Pogacar. At the same time, he finished behind Juan Ayuso on that summit finish. At 22, Ayuso is only a year older than del Toro, but he already has third and fourth place finishes at the Vuelta a Esapana to his name. He is also – and this is pretty important – del Toro’s teammate and leader.

So while del Toro may or may not have moved ahead of Adam Yates in the Team UAE hierarchy at this race, Ayuso probably still has the edge on a ‘been there, done that and by the way I’m ahead of all the riders who aren’t on our team’ basis.

Del Toro is, in short, a bit of an unknown quantity – not just to us, but to himself and his team as well. Just to put that in clearer context, tomorrow’s 28.6km time trial will be the longest he’s ever raced.

What’s next?

The second week kicks off with a couple more general classification skirmishes: the aforementioned time trial and then a hilly affair on Wednesday (Stage 11).

Stage 13 (Friday) might be an interesting finish, but shouldn’t prove too consequential in the grand scheme of things.

Stage 15 (Sunday) has a couple of big climbs and then quite a long chunk of flat to finish. If they’d plopped this stage in the final week, the main contenders wouldn’t bother, but someone might go buck wild with the next rest day in the offing.

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Live TV coverage

Say what you like about Eurosport’s coverage, but they were always committed to covering road cycling. Eurosport’s gone now though, which means that rather than paying not-very-much to watch cycling for a few months a year, you now get to pay £30.99 a month for TNT Sports because TNT Sports also broadcasts lots of high profile sports you aren’t interested in. Hurray! What a result!

This situation is so rubbish, I’m not even going to bother linking to the TNT Sports sign-up page.

Highlights

After a year or two of trying to track down a channel called DMAX in the listings, the free-to-air version of the Giro d’Italia highlights has returned to the marginally-more-recognisable Quest, which is available on Freeview. It seems to be quite reliably scheduled for 7pm each day.

It’s pretty much the same team that used to do the Eurosport coverage, but hopefully we’ll see an uptick in quality. The Eurosport/TNT programme has always been perfectly acceptable, in its own way, but not a patch on ITV4’s dry, acerbic, expansive Tour de France equivalent. This really matters now though. With ITV having lost Tour rights for 2026 onwards, they really need to narrow the gap or everyone’s lives will be immeasurably worse.

Here

As you may have deduced, I’m increasingly pressed for time of late. It’s the nature of freelance writing that the things that don’t pay their way tend to get squished out a little and this website is always the most vulnerable to squishing.

I’m going to have a stab at covering the Giro though. Let’s see how I go. If you haven’t done so already, here’s why you should sign up for email updates.

This is an updated version of last year’s article about UK TV coverage of the Giro d’Italia.

I want to break free

On Stage 9 of the 2021 Tour de France, Australian rider Ben O’Connor got in the break, stayed away, and finished six minutes ahead of the main contenders. The victory saw him vault up 12 places in the general classification to second – the only man within five minutes of Tadej Pogacar. He went on to finish fourth overall.

On Stage 6 of the 2024 Vuelta a Espana, he repeated the trick. With about 30km to go, he and his last remaining breakaway companion had a gap of about five minutes or so on the peloton.

O’Connor felt that was enough of an advantage that he could ride on alone and still be ahead come the finish, even if the pace picked up behind him – which it surely would.

And it did. But not by much much. In fact not by as much as O’Connor increased his own pace, because somehow he was 6m31s ahead of everyone by the line.

Primoz Roglic, who had been leading until that point, wouldn’t have been too bothered about losing the red jersey in itself, but he’d probably banked on having just a few seconds to claw back. As it was, fatigue, disorganisation and O’Connor landed him with a sizeable 4m51s deficit.

It was a spectacular end to a stage that had begun in the prosaic environs of a supermarket.

Yes, literally inside a supermarket.

Don’t take away my breakaway

From then on, the shape of the race was essentially set. Three-time winner Roglic looked the strongest rider uphill, but O’Connor was committed to defending the whopping great head-start he’d earned himself.

If this kind of situation were to come about in the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia less than a week into the race, the stages when the stronger climber would look to recover time would be obvious. There’d be a handful of summit finishes and the pursuer would seek to exploit each one to the maximum.

The Vuelta isn’t like that. Primoz Roglic didn’t look at a mountaintop finish and think “this is my big chance” and go absolutely all-out in a bid to brutalise his rival. Stages 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19 and 20 were all summit finishes. Plenty of the others were mountainous or had sharp climbs in the closing kilometres.

So Roglic chipped away.

I’ve regularly highlighted how the Slovenian’s responses in interviews are matter-of-fact to the point of comedy. Asked how he fancied his chances of winning the Vuelta after reclaiming a bit of time on Stage 8, he said: “I’m going every day full racing … we’ll see.”

So that’s what he did. Fifteen seconds here, twenty seconds there and then, finally, decisively, 1m49s on the Alto de Moncalvillo at the end of Stage 19 to retake a lead, which wasn’t likely to be surrendered on either of the two remaining stages.

Utterly bizarrely, Roglic seemingly hadn’t planned on taking quite that much time and only did so because some of his team-mates ignored his orders.

“I said I don’t need the stage [win] but, er, yeah, I mean… I will not say their names, but some guys decided, ‘yeah, we don’t listen to anyone – we pull’.”

Why the reticence? Name and shame them, Primoz!

Whisper it, but maybe they were right though. It’s not like it didn’t work out for him.

Roglic duly completed the overall victory, equalling Spaniard Roberto Heras’s record of four Vuelta wins.

For his part, O’Connor was happy not just with second place, but simply with having been in the lead at all. “I’ve led a WorldTour race for one day in my past and now I’ve led La Vuelta a España for two weeks,” he said.

As for Roglic, he was typically effusive about equalling the record for overall Vuelta wins.

“It’s nice,” he said.

Who knows when the next report will appear on this site? Certainly not me – and I write the thing. As such, it’s probably worth signing up for the email so you don’t miss it.

You can technically buy me a coffee or a Belgian beer if you like the writing here, but given my Vuelta coverage amounted to a preview and this piece, I won’t be holding my breath.

Last year the team that was then Jumbo-Visma, and is now Visma-Lease a Bike, arrived at the Vuelta armed with the guy who had just won the Tour de France (Jonas Vingegaard) and the guy who had just won the Giro d’Italia (Primoz Roglic). They then watched as another of their riders, Sepp Kuss, pushed them into second and third place respectively.

Kuss won’t have the support of either of those riders this year. But then he didn’t really have it last year either. He will instead get (probably more) assistance from the likes of Wout van Aert and veteran Dutch climbers Steven Kruijswijk and Robert Gesink. Gangly Belgian youngster Cian Uijtdebroeks is in the team as well. He finished eighth last year and they seem to have very high hopes for him long-term.

If there’s an asterisk against Kuss, as reigning champion, it’s that he missed the Tour with Covid and is only just back racing. That return was at the Vuelta a Burgos, which he won – but it didn’t strike me as a field awash with quality, all of them giving it their all.

While Primoz Roglic isn’t in the Visma team, he is in the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe one – his departure in large part due to frustration with that battle for team leadership. Roglic won the Vuelta three times in a row from 2019-2021 but cracked a vertebrae in one of the crashes that forced him to abandon this year’s Tour de France. That doesn’t equate to great preparation for a three-week bike race.

Next on our list of most-likelys come Tadej Pogacar’s henchmen, João Almeida and Adam Yates (both UAE Team Emirates), who finished fourth and sixth at the Tour de France last month.

The Tour’s King of the Mountains, Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) should be worth watching as well. He was visibly one of the strongest riders in the latter stages of that race and is good enough to have won the Giro d’Italia and finished on the podium in the other two Grand Tours. Much will depend on what he’s actually there to do: go for the overall, chase stages, or support someone else.

And that’s the big disclaimer with any number of potential contenders. The Vuelta can often be a bit of a ‘suck it and see’ race when it comes to racing form. With the big three who comprised this year’s Tour podium sitting this one out and the next best potentially compromised by recovery from injury, that seems to apply more than ever this year.

The race is sufficiently open that it’s hard to know where to draw the line when naming contenders. Daniel Martinez (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) finished second at the Giro. Enric Mas (Movistar) has finished second at the Vuelta on no fewer than three occasions. Mikel Landa (Soudal-QuickStep) ghosted his way to fifth at the Tour. Ben O’Connor (Decathlon-AG2R) will like the climbing after finishing fourth at the Giro. Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos Grenadiers) is back on home territory after a couple of top 10 finishes at the Tour. Alexandr Vlasov (Ineos Grenadiers) has been in good form this season, riding in support of others.

If Pogacar, Vingegaard or Remco Evenepoel were here, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned any of those guys. But they aren’t. So I did.

That’s the situation. The first week of racing will clarify things hugely. The Vuelta starts with a time trial tomorrow (Saturday) and then the first summit finish is on Stage 4 (Tuesday).

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