Tadej Pogačar won the 2026 Tour de France with a lead of more than six minutes over Remco Evenepoel in second place and took five stage wins in the process.
Pogačar was, of course, the favourite for the yellow jersey long before the race got underway. But there is no doubt the 27-year-old won in emphatic fashion, even despite his UAE Emirates-XRG teammates falling ill and the disruption of nighttime doping controls.
Here, we take a look at the records Pogačar set through this year’s Tour de France – and one record he’s yet to beat.
The youngest rider to win the Tour de France five times
Pogačar has now secured his place in cycling’s most exclusive club. His victory on Sunday was his fifth at The Tour de France, following his wins in 2020, 2021, 2024 and 2025.
This means Pogačar joins only four other riders in the race’s history to win five titles: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin.
At 27 years, 10 months and 5 days, he is the youngest rider to have won the Tour five times. He takes that record from Merckx, who won his fifth when he was 29.
When asked about the record after Sunday’s stage in Paris, Pogačar answered in his typically humorous manner. “I don’t like clubbing, so let’s aim to get out of this club,” he said.
7 consecutive podium finishes
Pogačar’s fifth win means the reigning champion has reached the Tour de France podium for the seventh consecutive year, which is a new record.
Behind Pogačar are Miguel Induráin and Jonas Vingegaard, who have five consecutive podium finishes each. Induráin won the race five years in a row between 1991 and 1995.
Vingegaard beat Pogačar to first in 2022 and 2023, and finished second in 2021, 2024 and 2025. The Dane may have claimed his sixth consecutive podium if he hadn’t crashed out of this year’s race on stage 15, but his consecutive podium count is now back to nought.
The indomitable Pogačar has now reached the podium in all of the nine Grand Tours he’s raced. He has further extended his lead over Anquetil, Raymond Poulidor and Hinault, who all achieved six consecutive podiums at Grand Tours.
A new Alpe d’Huez record
If you want proof of Pogačar’s insatiable appetite for success, you needn’t look further than stage 19, where the Slovenian broke Marco Pantani’s 29-year-old record up Alpe d’Huez.
With a comfortable lead in the general classification and the Queen’s Stage following on Saturday, other race leaders may have decided to conserve their efforts up Alpe d’Huez’s 21 bends. Not Pogi.
He hit the final climb of the stage 3 minutes behind the breakaway and the gap was down to 1 minute with 5.6km to go.
There was little the leading trio of Sepp Kuss, Lenny Martinez and Richard Carapaz could do once Pogačar reached them, except try to hold on.
Pogačar attacked in the final kilometre, leaving Carapaz and Martinez behind, to win the stage and set a new record of 35 minutes and 27 seconds up the iconic climb.
And another on the Tourmalet
Pogačar’s record up Alpe d’Huez followed another in the French Pyrenees. Stage six of the Tour started in Pau and finished in Gavarnie-Gèdre, taking in the Col du Tourmalet on the way.
Pogačar set a new fastest time up the Tourmalet of 43 minutes and 12 seconds, beating his own previous record of 45 minutes and 32 seconds, which he set with Vingegaard during the 2023 Tour.
UAE Emirates-XRG set a blistering pace up the hors categorie climb, which whittled down the GC group before Pogačar launched an attack 4km from the summit and rode solo for 40km to win the stage.
After the stage, Pogacar said: “I was really, really excited for today. All the guys were really hyped so I knew it would be a good day.”
The day was sweetened by winning the yellow jersey back from Torstein Træn and claiming the Souvenir Jacques Goddet award, which is given to the first rider to reach the top of the Tourmalet and comes with a €5,000 prize.
The fastest Tour de France
These achievements and the general theme of recent Tours might make this record seem far from surprising, but the 2026 Tour de France was the fastest on record.
Pogačar completed the race in 73 hours, 56 minutes and 26 seconds with an average speed of 43.326kph.
This is the second year in a row when the Tour de France has set a new fastest time, after the 2025 Tour achieved an average speed of 42.8491kph and took the record from the 2022 edition.
The Grand Boucle also saw the fastest stage in its history this year. Uno-X Mobility’s Søren Wærenskjold won stage 11 from Vichy to Nevers with a remarkable speed of 50.9kph.
Days in yellow
Despite having one of the most impressive palmares in professional cycling, there is one Tour de France record Pogačar is yet to call his own: days in yellow.
The young Slovenian has worn the maillot jaune on 71 occasions. That means he’s closing in on Hinault’s count of 79 days in yellow, but he’s still behind Merckx’s record of 111 yellow jerseys.
This year, Pogačar wore yellow for 16 stages, so he’d have to repeat that achievement two and a half times to equal the Cannibal's record. Merckx, at least for now, remains the greatest of all time for most.
There is another record Pogačar’s yet to claim – most stage wins. He may have added five to his tally this year, but he’s still nine behind Mark Cavendish’s record of 35.
