Stage 15 of the Tour de France produced one of the toughest images of this edition as Jonas Vingegaard abandoned after a heavy crash on a technical section. After the stage, Team Visma | Lease a Bike sports director Marc Reef faced the media to detail the Danes condition and lament an incident that...

The Tour de Francelost one of its main protagonists on Sunday. Jonas Vingegaard was forced to abandon the race immediately during stage 15 after a heavy crash on a technical section, bringing to an end another duel with Tadej Pogacar that had defined recent editions of the Grande Boucle. He has con...

Visma-Lease a Bike have no plan B at the Tour de France. The Dutch team were all in on Jonas Vingegaard, supporting the Dane towards the dream of winning the Tour and Giro d'Italia in the same season.Sadly, that dream is now over, with Vingegaard crashing out on stage 15 of the race, and breaking his collarbone. It has deprived the race of a key character, the only rider who has ever beaten yellow jersey Tadej Pogaar at the Tour overall. "What is there to say?" His teammate Matteo Jorgenson said at the top of the Plateau du Solaison after the stage. "I don't have much other than it's gutting. We're on stage 15, we had no Plan B. We were all in with Jonas, we all believed in it, and I thought it was beautiful. Today was going really well, he was on a really good day I think, and bike racing sucks some times, it really does."Visma sports director Marc Reef, at the bottom of the climb outside his team bus, added: "We went through a corner, I also didn't have a good picture on TV, we came around the corner in the car and he was laying there. It's unfortunately really shit that this happened and he had to abandon. He's gone to the X-Ray van now to see how he is. I said that I felt sorry for him at that moment, and it was quite quickly clear that he could not continue. He said he had pain, but there's almost not much you say at that moment. "They put him in an ambulance and then he left. We had a big goal today to try and win the stage, everything went according to plan until the moment he crashed. We planned this morning with two riders ahead, with the situation under control, with him feeling really, really good. The situation was under control, the time gap was under control, and we were ready to go for it."Asked if it the road where the incident happened was dangerous, Jorgenson replied: "It didn't seem like it, the motorbike double checked in the corner and took the left side of this traffic island, Victor [Campenaerts] was following his line, and it was definitely not the smooth line to the right, we ended up braking, and I'm sure there was a ripple effect, and I'm sure he crossed wheels or hit... "As often happens in this sport you have a plan, you're in good shape, these things happen, and they're hard to accept, but they have to be accepted."Until the crash, everything had been going well enough on Sunday. They might have been four minutes behind Pogaar on general classification, but they were still challenging. Now they will have to reset on the fly, easier said that done 15 stages into the toughest bike race of all."We have a different Tour now, but I'm at least going to think about what happened today, check in with Jonas tonight, and then we will take the rest day and think about the rest of the Tour," Jorgenson explained. "It's difficult to put into words, but it's our whole life. We spend most of the year on top of a mountain, training, weighing all our food. "You do everything, you come to the Tour, you do 15 stages, and do everything pretty well, and we're in a good position, and it's a mental job to try and accept these things. It happens to everyone, crashing and losing your goal, but every time you have to take a beat and say this is a special sport, for sure."

The Tour de France is often shaped as much by survival as by strength. Across three weeks of racing from the Grand Dpart in Barcelona on 4 July to the final stage in Paris on 26 July, crashes, illness, heat, fatigue and withdrawals can quickly reshape the peloton, from nervous sprint stages and exp...

Tadej Pogaar has said he "totally accepts" anti-doping regulations if they are "necessary to prove that we are riding clean" after he was tested in the early hours before stage 15 of the Tour de France.The UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider and yellow jersey said that this year has been "very strange" with testing, culminating in he and second-placed Jonas Vingegaard being woken up for tests on Sunday morning, mid-race.The pair appeared to be the only riders tested in such an unusual way. The UCI's anti-doping rules, Article 5.2 reads: "The UCI may require any Rider over whom it has Testing authority, who has not retired, including Riders serving a period of Ineligibility, to provide a Sample at any time and at any place."An additional comment says: "Unless the rider has identified a sixty minute testing window between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., or has otherwise consented to testing during that period, the UCI will not test a rider during that period unless it has a serious and specific suspicion that the Rider may be engaged in doping." There has been no communication from the International Testing Agency (ITA), the body that runs anti-doping for the UCI, on the issue. The race leader is subject to a test every day post-stage, along with a random selection of other riders; they can also face other random tests through the Tour."They were really nice today, the doctor who woke me up," Pogaar said in his post-stage press conference. "They were nice, they apologised, it's not their fault that they come. I asked because I thought the window was 11pm to 6am they cannot come, but they replied to me that it's a night control. I don't argue, I hope I will sleep after. I couldn't. It's a little bit strange, but I accept it if this is necessary to prove that we are riding clean, then I totally accept it. I commit to it. "But it's shit when you sleep for four hours in the middle of a three week Tour. If Jonas, if he was tested at 2am in the morning, he probably slept less than four hours, or his deep sleep was ruined. It ruined the night. If this is what we have to do, then we do it."Stage winner Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) did not sound a conciliatory tone: "It's pretty disrespectful. To be honest, I had it, I would send my team to wake them up to feel how it is. It's something inhuman, it's something that we should not accept as athletes. Everyone knows sleep is the only recovery ,moment we have, and if that gets disturbed. This is the hardest and the biggest race in the world. This is a shame that this happened, and I hope it doesn't happen any more in the future."Pogaar, asked if he knew why he and Vingegaard had been targeted, said: "This year, it has been very strange with the testing in general. If I can sit here two more minutes I can explain. It has been going on strange with controlling, they're doing different a little bit different testing than usual. They're doing everything. They're trying to do different things. "For example, I counted how many controls I had at home from 1 January to end of Classics, when I was at home I was already waking up at 6am every morning to check the doorbell if someone was ringing because I had so many visits. I didn't want to go for dinner or whatever or to supermarket because they were coming at random hours, not in our slot."The Slovenian also spoke of blood tests happening after races, including after Strade Bianche, which he won. A modification to the UCI's testing and investigations regulations from last month reads: "If a blood sample is to be collected in a serum tube from the rider, sample collection shall not occur within sixty minutes of the riders training, participation in competition or other similar physical activity.""Then came also Strade Bianche, I had a blood test after the race," Pogaar said. "This was really strange for me, because normally if there's a blood test, the rule was before April 2026 that after you have a heat, sauna, hard session, there was a two hour window that you cannot test the blood. After Strade I did the press conference, I came to the control station one hour and a half after the finish and there were still six riders in front of me. All six riders did a blood test as well, so we needed to wait one hour. After one hour from the race they started to test. I think this was out of the rules, because Strade was before April. "From April on they changed the rule that we can be tested one hour after the stage. It happened here at the Tour, they tested after some stages, the blood. Now, today happened."

The 2026 Tour de France will take place from the 4th to the 26th of July. Throughout the21 stages, the peloton will be racing through the mountains, sprint stages, cobblestones, individual and team time trials, and even. We take a look at all stages, their official profiles, and preview the days -...

Remco Evenepoels win on stage 15 of the Tour de France was completely overshadowed by Jonas Vingegaards withdrawal after a heavy crash on the descent before the Plateau de Solaison. The first to lament it was Tadej Pogacar, the Danes great rival in recent years, who showed deep sadness when he le...

Remco Evenepoel experienced one of the most special days of his career on Sunday. The Belgian from Red Bull outsprinted Tadej Pogacar at the end of stage 15 of the Tour de France 2026, taking his first highmountain stage win against the GC favourites and confirming the major step up he has made in...

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 the y...

Twenty minutes after Remco Evenepoel had scored one of his biggest ever victories, a mountain-top stage victory at the Tour de France, his Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe teammate Maxim Van Gils was in a state of part-disbelief and part-joy.We won! We won with Remco! Van Gils screamed into the face of Tim van Dijke who smiled he of course knew the good news and the pair shared a warm embrace.Van Gils spent most of May and a good portion of June with Evenepoel in Sierra Nevada, training at altitude in southern Spain to prepare for the Tour. For much of that period, Van Gils had concerns.At altitude, we were not flying, I have to say, Van Gils said. We were in shape, Remco is always a special guy, but we were not, lets say, extremely good.But then one week after the Dauphin [Tour of Auvergne-Rhone Alpes - ed] we did the recon [of the final Tour stages] together and Paul Magnier and I were completely f**ked. And he was still fresh, so there we saw he was in good shape.It was a completely different Remco that had arrived. He was really hungry, you saw that fire in his eyes, and also now he is super focused. Sometimes we eat a little bit of Nutella, but hes not touching Nutella at the moment.Those worries Van Gils had were allayed on stage 15 to the Plateau de Solaison, when Evenepoel not only kept with Tadej Pogaar and his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate Isaac Del Toro, but won a finish line sprint to beat the pair. After Jonas Vingegaards abandonment, Evenepoel now sits second overall. He is exactly five minutes behind the runaway leader Pogaar.Victory was proof, Evenepoel said, that favouring a big block at altitude over racing was the right call. Even if Van Gils took a while to see the fruits of it.Of course, this needs good preparation, and I think what Ive shown today is the reason why I went out of competition for more than two months.I decided to do a lot of long climbing training sessions to lose weight because with the shape and body condition that I have now, this is the only way that I can do this . Its not coming from nature. It makes me very happy and satisfied for sure.The three-time world champion and two-time Olympic gold medallist knew what it all meant. This, a mountain stage of the Tour de France, is really high up in my list [of greatest wins], he beamed. Its one of my best rides ever.Of course [World and Olympic] championships are something else, but in terms of stage racing this is one of the most beautiful ever.(Image credit: Getty Images)Evenepoel has beaten Pogaar in time trials before, but he had never got the better of him in the mountains until now. Tadej is just outstanding. Whenever hes in for the win, he grabs it. So if theres an opportunity to beat him, you need to grab it and try to do everything you can to do it, Evenepoel said.For me its something new that Ive just experienced to follow the best climbers in the world on such a hard climb a steep one as well and to still be able to win.I knew that together with yesterday this was one of the days to really be on a good level, where I knew that a lot of the GC could be made or could be set.The bookmakers will be predicting that Evenepoel doubles up on Tuesday, when he starts the 26.1km time trial by the shores of Lake Geneva as favourite. It gives him a golden chance to cement his second place in the standings.Going with this feeling into the rest day and into the TT day, its pretty amazing, he said. "Im just very happy with where I am and with how the Tour is developing so far.Has the result of stage 15 settled the battle for supremacy within the Red Bull team? Is Evenepoel, who has a 1:48 advantage in the GC over his teammate Florian Lipowitz, now the rider the German team will ride for?For the moment it doesnt change anything because there can always be days that I also lose time, Evenepoel said, echoing comments hes made throughout the race. Every day is a new opportunity and you have to grab it with both hands. Today I really had the legs to go for the win so I just made a good decision to try and follow.But I also think Lipo is still in a very good position on the GC, so he needs to fight for his own spot for sure, and I will fight for mine. I think thats the way that we have to do it now.Van Gils agreed. I think its still the same as it was in the beginning, he said. I think everyone is making it [the supposed rivalry between the pair] bigger than it is. I can tell you theres no real tension between them.They like each other, and we have a really good atmosphere on the bus. Both of them are making jokes with each other and with us. I think its more the media that are hyping it up more than what it is.