On the first rest day of the 2025 Tour de France gave Tadej Pogacar, the three-time Tour champion, a chance to catch his breath after a frenetic opening week.
“When we arrived to yesterday’s stage, I was so happy because the first nine stages were really hectic and nervous, and we expected this,” Pogacar admitted.
“So yeah, I’m just happy we survived that, I mean Joao didn’t, but here we are now, our terrain is coming, the climbing terrain, so it will be less stress.”
“We can generally say that it was a really good week, except that we lost João, that’s the only big blow, but otherwise we sit comfortably in GC and we are ready to attack the mountains,” Pogacar concluded.
“Yeah, we lost Joao, he showed true warrior spirit in the last two days that he was riding, but I can’t imagine riding with a broken rib and other injuries,” Pogacar said.
“I’m really sad that he had to leave because we had a really nice group and really good atmosphere, and he was looking forward to the next two weeks to defend the yellow jersey, which we lost yesterday.”
“It’s not too much of a big deal because we still sit quite close to it,” Pogacar said about Healy moving into yellow on stage 10. “The main GC rivals are still a little bit behind, they will have to attack, and yeah, we will see if Ben can hold on to the yellow jersey for a couple of stages.”
