Jonas Vingegaard has won the Tour de France for a second year in row after as the race reached its usual conclusion on the streets of Paris.
The Danish rider crossed the finish line after the 21-day race seven minutes and 29 seconds ahead of UAE Team Emirates Tadej Pogacar, the champion in 2020 and 2021. Pogacar's teammate Adam Yates of Britain finished third.
Vingegaard's winning margin was the largest since 2014 when Italian Vincenzo Nibali took the fabled champion's yellow jersey by 7 min 39 sec.
The final stage saw a surprise winner in Jordi Meeus of the Bora team, with Jasper Philipsen denied a fifth stage win on this Tour right at the line in a photo finish.
It had been a three-week slog over 3,405 kilometres with eight mountain stages across five mountain ranges. Vingegaard seized control of the race over two stages in the Alps.
Little had separated the two rivals until Vingegaard finished a time-trial one minute, 38 seconds ahead of Pogacar on Tuesday, then followed up the next day by finishing the toughest mountain stage of the race almost six minutes ahead of his exhausted rival.
Afterwards, Pogacar described it as “one of the worst days of my life on the bike” and he managed to respond by winning the penultimate stage. But Vingegaard still had an insurmountable lead going into the finale – a mostly ceremonial stage which is contested at the end by the sprinters.
“It's a feeling of being proud and happy – we're winning it for the second time now. It's really amazing,” Vingegaard, 26, said.
“Today with all the Danish people here was really amazing. I have to say thanks not only to my team and family but to the whole of Denmark. They support me and I'm really grateful for this.
“It's been a long journey but it also went by so fast. We race every day and one day takes the other. It's been a super hard race and a super good fight between me and Tadej. I enjoyed it all the way.”
For Pogacar, it was time to reflect on a brutal end to his Tour hopes. The Slovenian, who suffered a wrist fracture in April, came into the Tour unsure of his form.
After two weeks of going toe-to-toe with his main rival, he was crushed in the time-trial before cracking in brutal fashion in Wednesday's final Alpine stage on the lung-busting Col de la Loze.
Vingegaard said his Jumbo-Visma team had a plan to make Pogacar crack, but the 24-year-old saw it differently.
“The only moment they tried to crack me was on Marie Blanque [in the Pyrenees in the opening block of racing]. He was so much better and the next day they tried to crack me completely but I won the stage [in Cauterets Cambasque],” Pogacar, who won the best young riders white jersey for a fourth year, told a news conference.
“After that I just cracked myself alone. Nobody cracked me it was all on me, nobody did anything to me. It was me and my bad feeling. I cracked myself.”
To take it to the next level, Pogacar will need to win the Giro and the Vuelta, having already won three of the five Monument classics.
“The Giro is my favourite race but it's so hard to do Giro and the Tour the same year and the Tour is the biggest race in the world,” he said.
Pogacar also wants to beat Vingegaard in France before possibly moving on to “new challenges”.
“I have a huge respect for him. I think we will have a good future together – I said it like we're a couple,” he added with a laugh. “In the future we'll still battle it out.”
