Mathieu van der Poel claimed an outstanding victory on Stage 9 of the Tour de France after spending the day in the breakaway and producing a decisive attack on the final climb before beating Tobias Halland Johannessen, Tom Pidcock and Alex Baudin in the uphill sprint to the finish in Ussel. The stag...

A spectator was seriously injured and others hurt after a car driver crashed into the crowd close to the finish line of stage nine of the Tour de France on Sunday.According to reports in the French media, the driver of a car in the convoy suffered a medical episode and crashed into the crowd, injuring eight spectators, in the time leading up to the finish. Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech) won the stage, with no evidence of the incident visible.The prefecture for the Corrze dpartment told AFP that one person was taken to hospital, but not critically injured, while seven others sustained minor injuries, RMC reported . The Tulle prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into the accident, according to RMC, but the driver was not taken into custody.The Tour's organiser, ASO, declined to comment.More to follow...

The 2026 Tour de France classifications will shift across three weeks of racing, from the Grand Dpart in Barcelona on 4 July to the final stage in Paris on 26 July. Across time trials, sprint stages, breakaway opportunities and the high mountains, each day can alter the shape of the race for yellow...

France feels stretched out sometimes. The entire country appears to just go on forever. Even in these days of immediate connection, you can feel the France that Annie Ernaux wrote about in The Years: "The gateway to the exotic was the nearest big town, the rest of the world unreal."Nowhere is this more true than the Corrze, through which stage nine of the Tour de France marched on Sunday, one of the least populated dpartments in France, a keystone in the diagonale du vide, the empty corridor that strikes through the country. It's a region that most would only know about because of the Tour, even the French.The race is a perfect showcase for the area, just as the land is inextricably linked with the race. It helps that the Corrze is also on the edge of the Massif Central, and so the perfect terrain for a thrilling stage of the Tour, even in a red weather warning. It was escape territory, with endless short, sharp hills which were the perfect launchpad for attacks, and so it proved.Mathieu van der Poel triumphed from the breakaway in Ussel, with fans and the four teams represented in the breakaway relieved that it was still possible for escapees to hold off the peloton, that tactics could still outfox sheer power. Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility) was second, ahead of Tom Pidcock (Pinarello Q36.5) and Alex Baudin (EF Education-EasyPost)."It turned out to be the complete chaos stage we thought it was going to be," Uno-X sports director Stig Kristiansen said post-stage. "It was a quick start, because there was a sprint after 14km with the shortened stage. It was so warm that people would either have to go a little bit slower, or it was going to be fire because the rest day is tomorrow, and there are two more or less easy days behind them, and the peloton opted for the chaos. It never stopped."Despite the chaos, it did not always seem like the break would make it. The men up the road were never given much leeway. UAE Team Emirates-XRG, who crushed the hope of a similar move on stage three, seemed intent on doing the same again.(Image credit: Getty Images)"It was the first time I thought it could work and I really thought I could win," fourth-placed Baudin said. "Today, for a moment, I thought we were going to get caught again, so it was a little hard in the head. But yes, I'm really happy that it went well. On stages like this, it's made for the breakaway. "If the GC teams start to control these stages, we don't watch TV anymore. At what price? Where do we have to go? We had to fight all day long. I don't know who was driving and how he was driving behind us, but it never let up."It was a relief, then, that the break wasn't caught, and those who had put in their all could fight it out for the win, even if it wasn't Baudin or Halland Johannessen."When you go in a die-hard breakaway, there are always big quality riders," Kristiansen said. "It's always going to be difficult to win. If you end up on a mountain, it'll be [Isaac] del Toro or [Juan] Ayuso, and if you end up in a sprint like this with Mathieu or Wout van Aert, it's close to impossible. Tobias did a really good sprint, but Mathieu van der Poel is super-quick. [It was] good that he is number two."In the stretched out France, the Tour needs breaks to be able to survive in order to show off the landscape, to fill up this empty region with excitement. The Tour still visits the exotic, like the Corrze is to many, and the unreal is still there.

* 'Win' comes with a hard asterisk now of course... but we can still look back fondly at the rapidly evolving road bike technology of the time

The Cyclistes Professionnels Associs (CPA), professional cycling's riders' union, is in discussions with Tour de France organisers about the possibility of starting selected stages earlier in the morning to reduce riders' exposure to extreme temperatures. According to CPA representative Staf Scheir...

Roxanne Bertels, the partner of Mathieu van der Poel, paid a visit to the Tour de France this week and offered a glimpse into life as the partner of one of cycling's biggest stars. Appearing on Belgian television programme Vive le Vlo alongside the partners of Jasper Philipsen and Jonas Rickaert, B...

I met up with an old friend recently. We used to race together as students and have kept in touch, but I hadnt seen him for a long, long time. Since we raced together Ive gone on to do more bike racing, and he went on to start a business that made him irritatingly rich. (Irritating to me. He seems OK with it.)Im not sure Id have made the company work without bike racing you learn so much thats so useful. Im sure youve lots of transferable skills if you ever decided to grow up and get a real job, he said casually.My first thought was to tell him that the main thing Ive learned from cycling is how to sack off to go for a ride. I can be endlessly creative in my justifications for this. My essential go-to is always the promise that Ill return energised and ready to do useful work, but Ive also come up with thinking time, meditation and something to do with blood sugar levels that makes my brain work better I cant quite explain it but if my theory is right, Ill be able to express it more clearly when I get back.There are other things Ive learned that might possibly be more use in a business environment. I can cope with disappointment, for example. It would almost be worth applying for a real job so that when the interviewer asks me what talents I have, I can tell them that, first and foremost, when it all turns to crap and were standing outside the building with all our possessions in bin-liners, it wont cause me too much personal distress.Ill be able to add that a mastery of excuses long honed round the result board of a time trial means that not only will I be relaxed in the face of disaster, but that someone above me will take the blame.Years of tinkering with bikes has given me a can-do approach. Almost always if you take something apart carefully its possible to put it back together again. Sometimes in this process you manage to fix a problem, either knowingly or unknowingly. Usually you learn something interesting along the way. But the key is not to be put off by apparent complexity. Get some tools and get cracking.This means that in an actual job environment I would be fearless in the face of the complicated. I would be totally up for dismantling an entire IT system, for example. I wouldnt be the sort of person who sat wringing their hands and waiting for support, Id get right into it. Either Id fix it, or Id break it properly and so often in life its easier to fix the totally broken than the slightly broken. Its like giving the bike shop a clean slate to work with.Another business thing I really do understand is marketing. Ive learned a great deal from being its victim Ive discovered that Im almost infinitely suggestable, and that Im totally convinced that the more expensive something is the better it must be.I am far from unique in this. In cycling the best way to increase the demand for something is to put the price up. Im not sure that all the other industries have caught up with this yet. If you make it expensive and tell people its made of a new improved version of whatever material the thing is normally made from, to which you must give a proprietary name that cant be cross-referenced to any known universal standard, you can sell anything.Id say you couldnt put a price on knowledge like that, except that you can. I know because Ive paid it. Over and over again.I explained all this to my friend. He didnt offer me a job.How to..... be annoyingThere are occasions when you want to be friendly and cooperative in your dealings with other riders. And there are times when you do not. Most often its in either a race scenario where your agenda does not match the riders around you, or on the sort of group ride that, for whatever reason, needs to be made less fun and you feel that youre the little git who can make that happen.You can just sit on the back but thats only a little annoying, and only in a smallish group. If you want to try it, you can spice it up by beginning to go through before you change your mind, so the rider whos just done a turn has to sprint to get back in.You can be much more annoying at the front of the group. Dont go through just slow down and make someone come around you. Or go through, then slow down. Or go through and swerve from one side of the road to the other while making incomprehensible gesticulations.There are more subtle ways too. You can ride at a decent pace, but do it in (ideally) a downwind gutter. Swerve around drain covers and potholes without warning. Not annoying enough? Get out of the saddle every so often and make sure to kick the bike backwards a little when you do, to give the rider behind you a little fright. Its especially effective combined with a drain cover.But dont brake-check people. Theres being annoying, and theres that.Dear Doclast weekend on the club ride, one of our number broke their chain. We didnt have a chain-tool or a quick-link between us, so in the end we decided that pushing Jon home was the only option.This went all right, there were a few of us to share the pushing. Until we got to a junction a few miles from home.Left! shouted the ride leader.Why? said Jon. The GPS says go right. Its supposed to be a 100km ride its only about 90 if we go straight back. I want to get my weekly miles in.We turned left.

Mathieu van der Poel won a brutal, heat-shortened Stage 9 of the 2026 Tour de France, beating Tobias Halland Johannessen and Tom Pidcock in a four-rider uphill sprint in Ussel. Van der Poel ripped apart the days strongest breakaway on the Mont Bessou before holding his nerve as the reduced peloton...