The best seat in the house
It's the first rest day, which means two things: the laundry situation in the team hotels is dire, and we finally get to catch our breath and rewatch the opening week. Nine stages, Barcelona to Ussel, 1,451 kilometres — and the onboard cameras caught the parts television always misses. The elbows in the lead-outs. The sound of a peloton compressing into a roundabout at 60 km/h. The silence right before the Tourmalet does its damage.
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What the cameras saw
The week had everything. Visma–Lease a Bike won the opening team time trial around Montjuïc — first rider across the line, new rules — and put Jonas Vingegaard straight into yellow. It lasted a day: Isaac del Toro took stage 2 in Barcelona and the jersey with it, then Tadej Pogačar answered at Les Angles on stage 3.
Then the Tour did that thing it does. Mads Pedersen won in Foix while Torstein Træen quietly rode himself into yellow — and kept it through Olav Kooij's sprint in Pau. Normal service resumed on stage 6: Aspin, Tourmalet, and the new summit finish above Gavarnie-Gèdre, Pogačar back in yellow and looking very comfortable in it.
The sprinters got their week too — Tim Merlier doubled up in Bordeaux and Bergerac — before Mathieu van der Poel closed things out from the break on the brutal little climbs into Ussel on stage 9.
The damage after nine stages
Pogačar leads Vingegaard by 2′42″, with del Toro third at 3′27″. Racing resumes tomorrow at Le Lioran — the same Cantal roads where Vingegaard cracked Pogačar in 2024, so nobody in the grupetto is calling this over.
Follow the rest of the race on our Tour tracker — live progress, every stage profile, and results as they land.
