The records keep tumbling in the 2026 Tour de France. After race leader Tadej Pogacar shattered the record for the fastest climb of the Col du Tourmalet, Norwegian sprinter Søren Wærenskjold won the fastest-ever road stage, in a frenzied sprint into Nevers.
Pogacar revealed his stage had not been entirely straightforward. “I ran over a loose bottle with my front wheel and almost crashed,” he said. “I completely shat my pants there. Luckily, I managed to keep my handlebars upright. It’s nice to have days like this, but you still have to keep your focus throughout the stage.”
Wærenskjold took the 11th stage five days after his teammate Torsten Træen crashed out of the Tour in the yellow jersey, on the Pyrenean stage to Gavarnie-Gèdre.
His win came in a stage raced at an average speed of 50.9km/h, in an edition of the Tour that has also been one of the hottest.
“It means everything,” the Norwegian rider said of his first Tour success. “It’s my biggest win so far. Sometimes, I have good confidence and believe in myself. Sometimes, I feel tired and like it’s impossible to win here. I felt really bad at the start, but then I felt better in the final, with adrenaline and everything.”
The afternoon following France’s shock defeat to Spain at the World Cup, the sight of Julian Alaphilippe in the day’s four-man breakaway was a reminder of happier times. But that only led to renewed disappointment for home fans when the former world road race champion, who became a national hero when he held the yellow jersey for 14 days in the 2019 Tour, was dropped on the Côte-de-Chevannes, 38km from the finish. That may prove to have been 34-year-old Alaphilippe’s last hurrah in the Tour de France, although you can never say Nevers again.
From the start, the stage was raced at a furious pace, and the efforts of the breakaway came to nothing. With Alaphilippe long gone, the remaining trio were finally reeled in, just 5km from Nevers.
But the home nation’s populace were not the only ones recovering from a rough night and Tom Pidcock’s rollercoaster ride in his return to the Tour continues. Although he had crashed on Tuesday, the double Olympic gold medallist was fit enough to continue and finished with the peloton in Nevers.
Pidcock had attributed his crash on the descent of the Puy Mary to efforts to stop the Tarmac from melting in extreme heat. “I don’t know what they do with the roads here, [but] when they clean it, they put all this white shit all over it and it makes it really slippery,” he said.
After another virtuoso Bastille Day display by Pogacar, there was muted acceptance by his rivals that they could not match the four-time winner. “You have to be realistic,” Jonas Vingegaard’s sports director, Marc Reef, said. “Pogacar is currently the strongest. Bravo to him.”
There was little booing to be heard on the road from Vichy to Nevers and Pogacar appeared to have more fans than “haters”, despite the occasional presence of signs disparaging to the UAE Emirates XRG team.
He and his team have suffocated the peloton yet Pogacar has never really hidden his disdain for his rivals, even saying last summer that he will “probably not speak to 99% of the peloton when I finish my career” and will “focus on my close friends and family”.
The sentiment that he will not back off if there are any chances for he and his team to control the race, is very much in evidence again this July.
“In some ways, it pisses me off to see Pogacar win like that, because we too would also like to play at bike racing,” Kévin Vauquelin of the Netcompany Ineos team said.
“It’s tough on the breakaways,” the French rider said of the UAE Emirates XRG stranglehold, “but you also have to understand that when you have the strength to do it, then you might as well. What really discourages me is not having legs like Pogacar.”
