The Tour de France debutant Valentin Paret-Peintre banished the bitter memories of Julian Alaphilippe’s misplaced celebrations in Carcassonne on Sunday by becoming the fifth French rider to win at the summit of Mont Ventoux.
For the French, such success on the Giant of Provence, the first in the Tour in 23 years, justified huge celebration and plenty of tears. Paret-Peintre’s impressive victory came at the expense of the indefatigable Ben Healy, who was within a hair’s breadth of taking his second stage win of the Tour.
It was Paret-Peintre’s second Grand Tour win, after his stage victory in the 2024 Giro. “This morning I didn’t think this was possible, because I expected [Tadej] Pogacar to want to win,” he said.
Yet the absence of his Soudal Quick-Step team leader, Remco Evenepoel, who abandoned the Tour in the Pyrenees, opened a door of opportunity for the climber from the Haute-Savoie. “I could see that I wasn’t strong enough to drop Healy in the finale,” he said, of his team’s fourth stage win in this year’s race, “so I focused on trying to beat him in the sprint.”
But while Healy and Paret-Peintre were playing out the final moments of a sparring match that had started much further down the mountain, Jonas Vingegaard was keeping his promise to attack the race leader Pogacar.
Just 48 hours after Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike team had been lambasted for their lack of cohesion and accused of disloyalty towards the two-time champion by some critics, they were transformed into a cohesive well-drilled unit, working hard to support his efforts to dislodge Pogacar.
Sepp Kuss, Wout van Aert and Tiesj Benoot put in lengthy turns pacemaking their leader on the never-ending climb, in the hope of finally cracking Pogacar. “The team did really amazing today,” Vingegaard said. “Everybody worked, there was real commitment from everyone.”
But the Dane’s best efforts, which saw him make several attacks on his rival, came to nothing. On the Ventoux’s cruel final bend, perhaps the worst on the climb, the Slovenian again opened up a gap, sneaking clear to increase his overall lead by another couple of seconds.
“He followed me every time he attacked and I followed him,” Vingegaard said after the stage. “I don’t know if I could see any weaknesses today but at least, how good I felt gives me motivation. I will keep trying.
“I was feeling very good, so I’m happy. I didn’t get any time, but I take a lot of motivation from it.”
Yet insult was added to injury when Vingegaard collided with a photographer on the Ventoux summit’s cramped finish line. “A photographer stepped right in front of me,” he said. “I don’t know what he was doing. I went down. People who are working on the finish line need to be more careful.”
However hard he tries, he cannot find any weaknesses in Pogacar’s armour. Vingegaard’s first attacks, in the forested section of the climb, splintered the main peloton and took him across to his teammate Benoot.
For a fleeting moment and for perhaps the first time in this Tour, Pogacar initially showed signs of stress. At Chalet Reynard however, 6km from the top, the pair were still inseparable, although Vingegaard had one more card to play.
As they bridged up to another of his teammates, Victor Campenaerts, he had another ally to pace him into the decisive kilometres. But the Dane’s next move, with 4km to race, once more failed to dislodge the race leader.
The pair’s blistering times on Ventoux shattered all precedents. The past record, set by Spain’s Iban Mayo in a 2004 time trial, was 55 minutes and 51 seconds. Pogacar beat that mark by a minute and 20 seconds, with Vingegaard just two seconds slower.
Afterwards Pogacar, asked what his limits were, appeared offended by the question. “I don’t think we could ride much faster,” he said. “Jonas and his team did very good pacing. On our aero bikes we go pretty fast, maybe we pick up a couple of seconds. I don’t know. What do you want?”
He maintained too that, despite appearances, he was no Superman. “I’m definitely not Superman. I was born in Ljubljana. Today was an epic climb to do and we brought down the gap quite fast. We saw the winners in the last 800 metres, but even for Superman I don’t think it would have been possible to catch them.”
There were some other shifts in the overall standings, although Kelso’s Oscar Onley clung on and remains stubbornly in fourth place overall, after finishing 14th on the stage. But Primoz Roglic, ninth on the Ventoux, is moving up the standings and has now climbed into the top five, while the unflagging Healy remains in the Tour’s top 10, in ninth place overall.
