On a brutally hot afternoon in southern France, the breakaway made good at the 2026 Tour de France on Tuesday, staying well clear of an uninterested chase by yellow jersey Tadej Pogačar and his UAE Team Emirates-XRG outfit. The result – a breakaway packed with sprinters and a new yellow jersey who could hold it for quite some time – raised some questions about the tactics on display on stage 4 and what they might mean for the race going forward.
Why didn't UAE chase this move down?
The simplest answer is that Tadej Pogačar really likes winning, and unlike stages 2 and 3, stage 4 of the Tour de France did not have the sort of uphill finish that made a stage win likely for Pogačar (or for Isaac del Toro for that matter). While it is at least conceivable that Pogačar could have soloed away from the field on the steep final climb 35 km from the finish, that would have been a taller order than simply storming up the last few hundred meters the way he did on stage 3.
With that in mind, UAE's calculus determined that working hard to keep the race under control would have been too great an investment without the near guarantee of return that they enjoyed the previous two days. Of course, even with a great chance of stage victory, plenty of other GC teams would still pass up the chance to fight for wins on breakaway-friendly stages like the one we saw on Monday, but that's not really how Pogačar operates.
To be sure, it is also true that Pogačar's stage-hunting exploits also lead to small GC gains. As team boss Mauro Gianetti pointed out, "Winning stages can help you win the Tour de France. We were eight seconds down on Jonas Vingegaard after the team time trial, now we're equal on time." Then again, those small gaps are almost certainly not going to win the Tour, so we're going back to the original point that Pogačar really likes winning bike races. Whodathunk?
-Dane Cash
Why were sprinters in the break?
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