Tadej Pogacar delivered one of the most compelling performances of this year's Tour de France on Friday, winning stage 19 with a breathtaking solo ride up Alpe d'Huez — the legendary Alpine climb that has defined cycling history for decades. The 27-year-old Slovenian, already wearing the race leader's yellow jersey, launched his attack from more than three minutes behind the stage's leading group, caught the remaining front-runners with under two kilometres to go, and then dropped them all in the final 800 metres to cross the line alone.
The climb itself added drama to an already extraordinary effort. Alpe d'Huez, a 13.9-kilometre ascent averaging 8 percent gradient in the French Alps southeast of Grenoble, is one of cycling's most iconic and crowd-dense finishing climbs, its 21 numbered hairpin bends each dedicated to a past winner. Pogacar had to weave through dense, at times chaotic, crowds pressing onto the road throughout the ascent. He eventually caught Ecuador's Richard Carapaz — who had won the previous stage — and France's Lenny Martinez in the ski village of Huez near the summit, before powering away in the closing stretch. Martinez finished six seconds back, Carapaz nine. Remarkably, it was Pogacar's first-ever stage win on Alpe d'Huez, despite six years of dominance in the sport. He also shattered the mountain's long-standing climb record, scaling it in 35 minutes and 26 seconds — one minute and 24 seconds faster than Marco Pantani's benchmark set in 1995.
The victory was Pogacar's fifth stage win of this Tour and his 26th at the race overall since his debut in 2020. It came despite a difficult week for his team, with several key climbing domestiques — including Brandon McNulty and Tim Wellens — falling ill or struggling to finish stages. The win also makes him only the second rider in history, after Geraint Thomas in 2018, to take a stage victory on Alpe d'Huez while wearing the yellow jersey.
In the general classification, Pogacar now leads Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel of Belgium by more than seven minutes, with Mexico's Isaac Del Toro third at 9 minutes and 42 seconds and France's Paul Seixas fourth at 10:06. The tight battle between Del Toro and Seixas for the best young rider's white jersey — both riders in their first Tour — remains unresolved ahead of Saturday's penultimate stage, which again finishes on the Alpe d'Huez massif, this time via the Col de Sarenne on the mountain's less-travelled reverse side. Pogacar, whose fifth overall Tour title would place him among only five riders ever to achieve that feat, said his plan for Saturday is to help Del Toro secure the white jersey and a podium finish in Paris.