Jonathan Milan ended a six-year Italian drought with victory in stage eight of the 2025 Tour de France after breakaway duo Mattéo Vercher and Mathieu Burgaudeau were caught nine kilometres from the finish in Laval. The defending champion, Tadej Pogacar, remains in the yellow jersey.
In an inevitable bunch sprint on one of the Tour’s flattest stages, Milan, named after the best-selling novella, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, flew up the finish on Boulevard Pierre Elain to hold off Jonas Vingegaard’s teammate, Wout van Aert.
“To come with expectations and bring it home, that’s two different things,” Milan said of his first Tour win that ended a run of 113 stages without success for Italian riders. “It means a lot for me, it means a lot for my country.”
Bucolic and languid perhaps best describes stage eight of the Tour, with a truce called between most in the peloton as a heatwave descended. A weekend of rolling roads meant they began the winding journey south towards the Massif Central.
The growing in-race needle between Visma Lease-a-Bike and UAE Emirates was briefly forgotten as Vingegaard chatted with João Almeida, Pogacar’s key wingman for the mountain stages, asking about his recovery from the injuries sustained in Friday’s high-speed crash.
However, the antagonism between the teams, which included the defending champion pushing the Dane’s teammate, Matteo Jorgenson, in the feed zone during Friday’s stage, continued in Laval. “They do this a lot of times, coming in front of you in the feed zone like they are the only ones having bottles there,” Pogacar said. “Sometimes you have to be patient when you’re taking the bottles and pay respect to everybody.”
Vingegaard’s sports director, Grischa Niermann, was quick to respond to Pogacar’s comments. “I say the same back to him. Maybe we should tell our soigneurs to stand a little bit further apart from each other,” he said. “They both missed a bottle, so that’s a pity.”
Pogacar does not sound optimistic for Almeida’s prospects of continuing. “It’s one thing finishing today, with a lot of pain and suffering,” he said. “He’s a true warrior, but Monday is a really brutal stage. With a broken rib, it’s pretty hard to breathe, all out, and he was suffering with the accelerations today.
“Nobody expects him to go over the limit. It’s a bike race. You don’t need to kill your body for this.”
Ineos Grenadiers continue to seek a way out of their anonymity after another stage in which they merely made up the numbers. Their team leader, Carlos Rodríguez, is almost five minutes behind Pogacar, but Geraint Thomas remains optimistic that the Spaniard will bounce back in the mountains.
“This first week has certainly not been suited to his strengths,” Thomas said. “Someone said on the bus today that we’ve still got 75% of the climbing to come in this race, so I think he can still stay positive and look forward to that. Hopefully, if there’s a high pace in the mountains, then Carlos can benefit from that. We haven’t done any big mountains yet and that’s his strength, so hopefully we can start climbing up the GC next week.”
There is little doubt that Dave Brailsford, back in the fold after his sojourn at Old Trafford to oversee the Grenadiers throughout this year’s race, will have high expectations of better things to come. “Dave brings a different intensity to it and a different way of thinking and looking at things,” Thomas said of the Ineos director of sport. “He’s got the most experience there, so it’s great to have him around.”
Sunday’s ninth stage, from Chinon to Châteauroux, has no categorised climbs and offers another chance for the sprinters to take a stage win, prior to Monday’s rude awakening on the first mountain stage in the Auvergne.
Slovenia’s Pogacar (UAE Emirates) remains 54 seconds ahead of Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quick-Step) in the overall standings.
