Tour de France 2026 Stage 3: Pogačar Rules the Roost

A day after gifting the stage to Isaac del Toro, Tadej Pogačar reasserts himself atop the Tour’s first mountain finish at Les Angles, tying Jonas Vingegaard on time but claiming yellow on countback.

STAGE REPORT

MONDAY, 6 JULY 2026 — STAGE 3: GRANOLLERS > LES ANGLES (195.9KM)

A day after gifting the stage to his lieutenant Isaac del Toro, Tadej Pogačar asserted his own authority on stage three of the 2026 Tour de France. UAE Emirates-XRG’s Slovenian leader mastered the altitude finish at Les Angles to claim his 22nd career Tour stage win, his first of this year’s race, and opened a two-second gap over Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) on the road. The two men finish level on time in the overall standings once bonuses are added, but Pogačar takes the lead on a better combined tally of stage placings. Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) completed the stage podium ahead of Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM), and Pogačar’s 22nd stage victory draws him level with André Darrigade for the fifth-highest total in Tour history.

After two days spent entirely in Catalonia, orbiting Montjuïc, the peloton bid farewell to the Spanish Grand Départ for a 195.9-kilometre stage crossing into France. The road rose steadily as the race entered the Pyrenees, climbing above 1,500 metres for the first time this year on the way to a summit finish at Les Angles, 1,794 metres above sea level, at the end of 3,850 metres of total elevation gain. Racing continued under the scaled-back operation announced ahead of the stage for its French portion, with the publicity caravan absent from the road and spectators asked to stay away from the route while firefighting crews kept battling the wildfire still burning in the Pyrénées-Orientales.

Bernal Left Behind by an 18-Man Break

The 183-rider peloton rolled out of Granollers just after noon under sunshine, and the attackers wasted no time. Alex Molenaar (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) went clear as soon as the flag dropped, hoping to defend his polka-dot jersey, but his move was quickly swallowed up amid a flurry of counter-attacks featuring the likes of Egan Bernal (Netcompany Ineos) and Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike).

Valentin Paret-Peintre (Soudal Quick-Step) led the way over the first summit of the day, the category-three Côte de Sant Feliu de Codines at kilometre 17.2, though the fight for the breakaway raged on at a furious pace behind him. Louis Vervaeke (Soudal Quick-Step), Magnus Cort (Uno-X Mobility), Nelson Oliveira (Movistar) and Matteo Vercher (TotalEnergies) forced a gap open at kilometre 58, and successive waves of counter-attackers bridged across until an 18-rider group finally consolidated at kilometre 72: Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), Alex Baudin (EF Education-EasyPost), Nicolas Prodhomme (Decathlon CMA CGM), Harold Tejada (XDS Astana), Vlad Van Mechelen (Bahrain Victorious), Luke Plapp, Mauro Schmid (Jayco AlUla), George Bennett (NSN), Raúl García Pierna (Movistar), Alex Aranburu (Cofidis), Clément Braz Afonso (Groupama-FDJ United), Michael Storer (Tudor), Joris Delbove (TotalEnergies) and Abel Balderstone (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA). Egan Bernal had been on the verge of making the split himself when a mechanical problem took him out of contention.

The Road Rises

Trailing by 1’07” on the road, Baudin emerged as the group’s main threat to the Maillot Jaune. The escapees’ lead swelled to a maximum of 3’05” at kilometre 96, just as the race entered its final 100 kilometres and UAE Emirates-XRG took over the pace-setting from Visma-Lease a Bike, cutting the gap to 1’30” as Pedersen won the intermediate sprint in Campdevanol, at kilometre 98.4.

Soon after, the road tilted upward toward the Col de Toses, the first category-one climb of the 2026 Tour. García Pierna attacked from the bottom, joined in turn by Van Mechelen, Vercher, and eventually Baudin, Prodhomme and Bennett, with Baudin leading the group over the summit as UAE Emirates-XRG managed the gap behind. With 45 kilometres to go, the race crossed the border into France after some 340 kilometres of racing on Catalan roads.

UAE Control, Pogačar Concludes

Baudin attacked again at the foot of the Col du Calvaire, 11.4 kilometres at 4.1%, with only Prodhomme able to follow. Baudin took the mountains points at the summit for a second time, all but sealing the polka-dot jersey for himself, and pressed on alone soon after — mirroring a solo move that had carried him clear for the final 28 kilometres of stage one at last month’s Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. The peloton trailed by only 35 seconds as he entered the last 20 kilometres, and Baudin was finally caught with 11.5 kilometres still to race, having spent 125 kilometres clear of the bunch in total.

From there, UAE Emirates-XRG controlled the finale outright. Isaac del Toro upped the pace inside the final kilometre before Pogačar opened his sprint with 200 metres to go; Vingegaard, tucked on his wheel, was immediately distanced and crossed the line second, two seconds down, just ahead of Richard Carapaz and Paul Seixas. “It’s thanks to Isaac [del Toro] that I got extra power today. He committed more than 100% on the final climb,” Pogačar said afterwards. “Halfway through the stage, we decided it was possible to go for the stage win. I’m really happy we rode like this and it was an incredible finish. The team feels super good and when we can win, we have to take the opportunity. We tried, we gave it all and we won.” Pulling on yellow again clearly still meant something, even for a four-time champion. “To take the yellow jersey is a dream for any cyclist,” he said. “For me, I know it, but every time I can get it again on my shoulders feels really special. I don’t know how long it will last but we’ll try to enjoy every moment.”

Del Toro, who set the pace for his captain on the final climb and retained the lead in the young rider classification, took as much satisfaction from the team result as from his own ride. “It was super important to be up there with Tadej [Pogačar]. I’m so happy to see him with the Yellow Jersey,” he said. “We achieved our goal, and now I’m going on the podium with him. It’s something I never thought about before in my life.” Asked whether the white jersey itself might be within reach on his Tour debut, the Mexican stayed characteristically measured. “It could be, but as I said, I’m here to enjoy every moment, and I think you can see that every day,” he said. “I just want to be as happy as I can.”

Up the road, Baudin’s day-long effort earned him a jersey of his own, even if the stage win had slipped away. “This jersey is a reward for my efforts today. It wasn’t my main objective; I wanted to win the stage and take the Maillot Jaune,” he reflected. “With the legs I had, I really believed I could do it. I felt really good — that’s a good sign for the days ahead. But UAE wanted to win the stage. And when I saw the gap closing on the final stretch along those wide roads, with a headwind, I had my doubts… But the polka-dot jersey is a consolation.” For a rider who grew up watching the race, the moment carried real weight. “I can picture myself watching the Tour as a child, dreaming of that jersey,” he said. “Along with the Yellow Jersey, it’s the one I’ve always wanted to wear one day. Now, you have to fight to keep a jersey. I’m going to try to recover and hold on to it for as long as possible.”

The finish-line gap and the day’s time bonuses left Pogačar and Vingegaard perfectly level on overall time, a scenario resolved only by countback — the sum of each rider’s placings across the first two road stages, with the hundredths of a second from the opening team time trial excluded from the calculation. It is a rare enough occurrence in the bonus-seconds era, though not unprecedented: a similar tie arose after stage four of the 2025 Tour, when Mathieu van der Poel held yellow ahead of Pogačar on the same basis.

Numbers from Les Angles

Pogačar’s win was rich with historical resonance. His 22nd career Tour stage victory — and the 122nd of his professional career — draws him level with Frenchman André Darrigade for fifth on the sport’s all-time list, and it is the earliest in any Tour he has ever opened his stage-win account: in both 2024 and 2025 he had to wait until stage four, at Valloire and Rouen respectively, for his first win of the race. It also gives UAE Emirates-XRG back-to-back stage victories following del Toro’s success above Barcelona a day earlier — the sixth time the team has strung together consecutive wins, but the first time the double has been shared between two different riders rather than delivered entirely by Pogačar himself, as it was across stages 17 and 18 of the 2021 Tour, at the Col du Portet and Luz-Ardiden.

The dead-heat atop the general classification stands out too: a genuine tie between Pogačar and Vingegaard, separated only by their combined placings across the first two road stages once the team time trial’s fractional timing was set aside, a situation last seen after stage four of the 2025 race, when Van der Poel led Pogačar under the same rule. The win also extends Pogačar’s reign at the top of the classification to 55 days in yellow across his career, leaving the four-time champion just four days short of Chris Froome’s fourth-highest total in Tour history, and takes his overall collection of the race’s distinctive jerseys — 55 yellow, 3 green, 27 polka-dot and 75 white — to 160 in all. Between them, Pogačar and Vingegaard have now shared the top two spots on a stage 16 times, a tally that rises to 21 once final overall placings are included, a rivalry the Slovenian leads 16 stage wins to 5 and one that already more than doubles the next-best pairing in Tour history, François Faber and Gustave Garrigou, who managed nine stages and one overall placing together.

Further down the results sheet, Paul Seixas’s fourth place made him the first rider under 20 since the 1937 Tour to record two consecutive top-ten finishes, following his ninth place in Barcelona the day before; one more such result would draw the Decathlon-CMA CGM rider from Lyon level with Dutchman Danny van Poppel, the only 19-year-old to finish inside a Tour stage’s top ten three times, a feat achieved back in 2013. And after twelve mountains points in the day’s break, Alex Baudin lifted the polka-dot jersey from Alex Molenaar to become the 160th rider to wear the jersey since its introduction in 1975, and the first Frenchman to hold it since Lenny Martinez in 2025. Les Angles itself made history simply by hosting the finish: at 1,794 metres, it is the highest-altitude finish this early in a Tour since Superbagnères, 1,804 metres up in the Pyrenees, hosted stage three of the 1979 race — the day Bernard Hinault won an uphill time trial that had started lower in the valley, at Bagnères-de-Luchon.