Tour de France Final Rest Day Reflections

Breaking down where the GC contenders have won/lost time so far during a frenetic and fast Tour de France, and what it means for the race's final week

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After two weeks of scorchingly fast racing and a trip into the Pyrenees that proved telling in terms of how the GC contenders stack up, Tadej Pogačar has stamped his authority on the 2025 Tour de France with two devastatingly dominant climbing displays that distanced his top GC rival, Jonas Vingegaard, and left the rest, save for a few podium and Green/KOM jersey contenders of the field fighting for scraps, with last year’s third-place finisher Remco Evenepoel even leaving the race after struggling to hold pace on the last of three stages in the Pyrenees. While several decisive Alpine stages and a thrilling three-way battle for the Green Jersey remain between today’s rest day and the race’s finale in Paris, Pogačar has shown us that he has solved the problems that allowed Vingegaard to defeat him twice at this race previously and put himself on the path to winning his fourth career Tour de France crown. Let’s look at how we got here and what might still be in store during the final week:

Current GC Top Ten:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +4’13
3) Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull–BORA–Hansgrohe) +7’53
4) Oscar Onley (Picnic PostNL) +9’18
5) Kévin Vauquelin (Arkéa-B&B Hotels) +10’21
6) Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +10’34
7) Felix Gall (AG2R Citroën Team) + 12’00
8) Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno‑X Mobility) + 12’33
9) Carlos Rodríguez (INEOS Grenadiers) + 18’26
10) Ben Healy (EF Education‑EasyPost) + 18’41

Time Changes Between Top Three Since First Rest Day
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -2’56
Florian Lipowitz -4’48

Points Classification
1) Jonathan Milan (ITA, Lidl‑Trek)-251 pts
2) Tadej Pogačar (SLO, UAE Team Emirates‑XRG)–223 pts
3) Mathieu van der Poel (NED, Alpecin‑Deceuninck)–210 pts

KOM (Polka Dot) Jersey Top Three
1) Lenny Martinez (Bahrain-Victorious)-60pts
2) Tadej Pogačar (SLO, UAE Team Emirates‑XRG)-52pts
3) Thymen Arensman (INEOS Grenadiers) -48pts

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Where Time Has Been Won/Lost So Far

To understand how the GC battle might unfold in the final week, let’s look at where each of what I consider to be the two remaining potential winners took or lost time so far. I’ve isolated every stage where these two key contenders have won(+) or lost(-) relative to each other so far.

Stage 2 Uphill Finish
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -2 seconds

Stage 4 Uphill Finish
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -6 seconds

Stage 5 Time Trial
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -1’05

Stage 7 Uphill Finish
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -4

Stage 12 Summit Finish
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -2’14

Stage 13 Uphill Time Trial
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -36 seconds

Stage 14 Summit Finish
Tadej Pogačar +0
Jonas Vingegaard -6 seconds

Course Type Where Time Was Won/Lost Relative to Pogačar

Summit Finishes
Vingegaard -2’14

Time Trials
Vingegaard -1’41 (lost)

Bonus Seconds
Vingegaard -18 seconds (lost)

Three GC Rest Day Reflections

1) Tadej Pogačar & UAE Are in Full Control of This Tour: Through fifteen stages, Pogačar hasn’t lost a single second to second-place Jonas Vingegaard on any portion of the course, and has taken time on every stage where time has changed hands between top GC contenders. This tells us that there is no true angle for Vingegaard and Visma to exploit, as well as speaking to a total, and almost overwhelming, dominance from the race leader, and underscores that, barring a serious crash or health issue, he will ride to his fourth career Tour de France in Paris.

• In addition to controlling the overall race lead by a margin of 4+ minutes, the team of Tadej Pogačar has won a third of the stages so far at this Tour, taking five out of fifteen total chances, and appears set to continue to rack them up over the next few days.

  • In contrast, fifteen teams at this race have yet to secure a single stage win, with only six stages remaining, and only a handful of non-mountain stages remaining.

    • And if UAE is going to deploy its domestiques on these breakaway days, technically no stage is safe from their reign, and in theory, we could have a modern-era record-low number of teams with stage wins at the race.

      • Some rival riders and fans might cry foul at their greediness, but, in the future, perhaps fewer teams will turn up their noses at the chance to get in breakaways in the first week of the race, when superteams like UAE are still focused on conserving energy.

2) The Majority of Vingegaard’s Losses, While Costly, Have Been Largely Isolated to Two Bad Moments: However, while Vingegaard may find himself down by over four minutes, his losses have mostly been confined to a few specific moments:

• In the 71 minutes during the Stage 5 TT and Stage 12 climb of Hautacam, Vingegaard lost a total of 3’19, which is 78% of his total 4’13 deficit.

  • That means through the rest of the GC set pieces, Vingegaard has limited his losses to ‘just’ 54 seconds, which, considering Pogačar’s dominance, shows that outside of two bad days, the two riders are roughly equally matched.

    • Unfortunately for Vingegaard, these bad moments have opened up what appears to be an unbridgeable delta, barring a major issue or crash to Pogačar, and, even when he is producing some of the best performances of his career, like on the Stage 13 TT and Stage 14 mountain stage, he is still leaking time to Pogačar.

      • Across those two great days for Vingegaard, when he put over a minute into every other contender, he still lost 42 seconds to Pogačar.

        • This shows that while a close GC battle may be possible in the future, bridging the final gap between staying close to Pogačar and actually opening up a time gap on him looks increasingly difficult with every passing year.

3) We Are Heading Toward One of the Best Green Jersey Battles In Modern Tour History: Even if the battle of the Yellow Jersey is all but over, and Florian Lipowitz begins to slowly squeeze the life out of the race for the final podium spot, the fight for the Green Points Jersey is shaping up to be one of the best in recent memory.

• While traditionally thought of as the jersey for the best sprinter in the race, that is only due to the fact that sprinters have typically been the only riders to contest enough stages to rack up enough points for finishing in the top ten.

  • This year, it is being contested between the sport’s best climber (Pogačar), sprinter (Milan), and Classics rider (Van der Poel), harking back to the spirit of the competition.

    • This three-way battle is currently so tight, and the parcours so mixed through the final six stages, that in order to stay in contention, Milan has to either have his Lidl-Trek team perform the (potentially impossible) task of controlling the peloton, or get into the breakaways himself, to win four of the intermediate sprints on offer.

      • But, considering Milan has struggled mightily to get into any early moves so far, and the fact that 15 teams are still looking for stage wins and will resist Lidl-Trek’s attempts to control the breakaway if Milan isn’t present, it isn’t clear that he will win more than two remaining intermediate sprints, and there is a good chance he doesn’t win a single remaining stage.

        • This sets up a fascinating situation where Van der Poel will have to attempt to get into every remaining breakaway to pick up intermediate sprint points, and could even produce a battle between him and Pogačar in Paris on the new Classic-style finish to determine who takes the Green Jersey.

Stage 16 Preview

Tomorrow’s post rest-day stage serves up an almost Vuelta-esque hockey-stick stage where the peloton navigates 130 kilometers of rolling terrain before being hit with one of the most iconic and hardest climbs in Tour de France history, Mont Ventoux.

• Considering the tight three-way battle for the Green Jersey, the presence of the intermediate sprint point at kilometer 112 will add a layer of complexity to the stage since either Jonathan Milan will have to get into the early breakaway, or, failing that, force his Lidl-Trek team to control the race for over two hours, if he wants a chance at holding his Green Jersey.

  • This will become incredibly complex because a long stretch of flat terrain before the final climb means that a breakaway has a legitimate chance of holding off the GC group to win the stage, which will result in a vicious and brutal fight to get into the move.

    • The fact that four out of the last five trips up Ventoux have been won out of the breakaway will make this start even more frantic.

• Prediction: Tadej Pogačar wins the stage over Jonas Vingegaard after his UAE teammate Nils Politt keeps the gap to the breakaway close enough for the top two GC contenders to reel them in before the finish line.