Comments

Tour stage 9: Van der Poel hunts down victory from the breakaway

Tour stage 9: Van der Poel hunts down victory from the breakaway

It was touch and go as UAE chased hard in the peloton, but on a Classics-style stage 9, Van der Poel wrote the script, and triumphed in the four-man sprint to the line.

Cor Vos

After two consecutive sprint finishes, stage 9 had breakaway written all over it, and despite intense pressure from UAE Team Emirates-XRG in the peloton, four of the day's attackers made it the line. Among them was Mathieu van der Poel who led from the front from the flamme rouge and out-paced Tobias Halland Johannessen, Tom Pidcock and Alex Baudin to take a long-awaited first victory of the 2026 Tour de France for Alpecin-Premier Tech.

Just six seconds later, Filippo Ganna led the reduced peloton over the line ahead of Mads Pedersen, whose sixth place handed him 15 points on top of the 25 scored at the intermediate sprint early in the stage.

[race_result id=17 stage_id=89784 count=5 gc=0 year=2026]

[race_result id=17 stage_id=89784 count=5 gc=5 year=2026]

Did we do a good job with this story?