Tadej Pogacar seals third Tour de France title with stunning time trial victory in Nice as Mark Cavendish signs off

Updated 21/07/2024 at 22:07 GMT

The final day of the 2024 Tour de France bucked the trend with a time trial between Monaco and Nice instead of a processional parade in Paris - but the result was the same, with the relentless Tadej Pogacar wrapping up the overall win with a sixth stage victory. Pogacar beat rivals Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel in the race of truth as an emotional Mark Cavendish rode off into the sunset.

Stage 21 Highlights: Pogacar storms to victory in time trial to put gloss on Tour win

As the sun set on Nice and this enthralling edition of the world’s biggest bike race, Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates) pulled out all the stops to secure a third Tour de France title with his sixth stage triumph - hours after a legend of the sport, Mark Cavendish, bade an emotional farewell to the race he has lit up since 2007.

Pogacar was utterly peerless once again on the French Riviera, the 25-year-old Slovenian taking time to ease up and celebrate on the home straight beneath the statue of Apollo in Nice’s Place Massena - yet still winning the final time trial by over a minute on his big rival Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike).

They call time trials the race of truth - and on Sunday, the truth hurt for the two riders who have tried to match Pogacar over the past three weeks.

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No sooner had Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) lived up to his billing as world time trial champion to set the best time at the finish than Vingegaard - the outgoing double champion from Denmark - powered home 11 seconds faster for what could have easily been the winning time in any other year.

But Pogacar has ridden this Tour without putting a foot wrong - not just head and shoulders, but an entire body, above the rest. Not one to rest on his laurels, Pogacar blasted up the climbs of La Turbie and the Col d’Eze before putting in a daredevil descent that combined supreme bike-handling, blink-and-you-miss-it speed, purring technique and a large dollop of luck to devastating effect.

The luck? One locked rear wheel going into a corner that could have turned large swathes of the race leader’s yellow skinsuit red. But Pogacar rode his luck, steadied the ship, and pressed on like only he knows how: crossing the line in front of a roaring crowd 1'03'' faster than the rider who subjected him to painful defeats on the previous two editions of the Tour.

'Incredible' - Pogacar reacts to imperious third Tour de France title

“I cannot describe how happy I am after two hard years on the Tour de France - always some mistakes - and then this year, everything to perfection. I’m out of words. Incredible,” Pogacar said after becoming the eighth rider, and the first this century, to win both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same season.

“This is the first Grand Tour when I was totally confident every day,” he said. “Even in the Giro I had one bad day - but I won’t tell which one. This year, the Tour de France was amazing. I was enjoying it from day one till here.”

It was a race of many magical moments - with Pogacar emulating the great Gino Bartali to become only the second person in history to win five mountain stages in a single edition. A final-day time trial win added the cherry to the cake - and felt even sweeter for a rider who lives and trains in Monaco.

“Today, I felt super-good over the first climb. I’ve done the climb so many times in training - I did not waste any of my preparations,” he said.

With Evenepoel and Vingegaard setting off before him from the start ramp, Pogacar knew exactly what he had to do as the race left the Formula One circuit by the marina and parted Monaco via the steep La Turbie climb.

Seven seconds to the better of Vingegaard over the summit at the first time check, Pogacar stretched that lead on the Col d’Eze to 24 seconds before dropping like a stone on the descent, during which he added a further 40 seconds' advantage over his closest rival.

Vingegaard 'fights to the end' in time trial but comes up short against Pogacar

Given the downhill crash that almost ended Vingegaard’s season back in April in the Basque Country, it was perhaps no surprise to see the 2022 and 2023 champion take fewer chances on the downhill than the man breathing down his neck in yellow.

After powering up and down the Promenade des Anglais, Pogacar put Vingegaard out of his misery to set the winning time of 44:25 for the lumpy 33.7km course. The Dane - who looked shellshocked as Pogacar crossed the line - came second at 1'02'' and Evenepoel third at 1'13'' – mirroring their top three on the podium, where Pogacar beat Vingegaard by 6'17'' and Evenepoel by 9'18''.

The next rider in the top 10 was not only another 10 minutes back but also a team-mate of Pogacar’s - the Portuguese climbing domestique Joao Almeida. The gap back to 10th place Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain Victorious) of Colombia, who nudged down Italy’s Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek), was the best part of half an hour.

“In the last two years we’ve been hearing that this is the best era of cycling, the best competition ever, and if I were not competing myself, I think I could also say it was the best ever, at least for the GC,” Pogacar said shortly after his win.

“This kind of competition with Remco [Evenepoel], Jonas [Vingegaard] and Primoz [Roglic] is just incredible. And the young guys that are coming, more and more, I think we can all enjoy this moment in cycling.”

Finishing his 15th and final Tour in last place well over six hours behind Pogacar, British sprinter Cavendish all but confirmed his imminent retirement from cycling after achieving what he set out to do by becoming the Tour’s leading stage winner this July.

'Likely so' - Cavendish asked if Tour farewell was really his final race

Astana-Qazaqstan’s Cavendish, whose record-breaking 35th win came in Stage 5 at Saint-Vulbas in the opening week, was all smiles as he completed his final pedal strokes on a race whose sprints he has intermittently dominated for the best part of two decades.

“In the end, it was just about enjoying it today,” an emotional Cavendish, 39, said moments after crossing the finish line. “There was no pressure for me today, which is strange for the final stage of the Tour.

"I knew my family were waiting at the finish. It was just absorbing it. I got all my emotions out yesterday and I could just really enjoy today.”

Asked to confirm whether that was the last race of his career, Cavendish paused for a long time before saying, almost inaudibly: "Likely so, yeah."

Cavendish was not the only rider who bowed out of the world’s most popular show on two wheels, with German veteran Simon Geschke (Cofidis) also hanging up his wheels, along with the Frenchman Romain Bardet - this edition's first yellow jersey after bringing home a sensational Team dsm-firmenich PostNL one-two in Florence.

Tour de France 2024 Stage 21 ITT as it happened: Peerless Pogacar pulverises his rivals for sixth win

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games made the annual finish in the French capital impossible for the 111th running of the Tour. Instead of the usual processional stage and sprint on the Champs-Elysees, the first finish outside Paris took place on Sunday with a time trial on the French Riviera.

Not since Greg LeMond’s famous eight-second overall win over Laurent Fignon in 1989 had the Tour concluded with a race against the clock. Thirty-five years after that memorable moment, the two big rivals of the modern era took to the glamorous coast of south France for one final showdown - although a gap of five minutes separating them took away any veneer of suspense.

A lumpy 33.7km course saw the remaining 141 riders set off individually from Nice to Monaco via the climbs of La Turbie and the Col d’Eze, with Britain’s Cavendish the second down the ramp on what was his final hour of Tour action.

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France’s Lenny Martinez (Groupama-FDJ) outdid many of the specialist time trailers to set the early target time and confirm that this was a course that suited the climbers and GC men.

Martinez was eventually dethroned by the Colombian Harold Tejada (Astana-Qazaqstan) who set up shop in the winner’s enclosure before the expected game of musical chairs among the riders from the top 10.

Canada’s Derek Gee (Israel-Premier Tech) secured an impressive ninth-placed finish in his debut Tour and took over from Tejada for a matter of minutes before Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike) dislodged him from the hot-seat - this despite the American crashing on an uphill bend shortly after the start in Monaco.

But then came the three riders who have animated vast swathes of this race. First up, the white jersey of Evenepoel, who had the ignominy of setting the best time at all time checks and the finish - only to be knocked down two pegs, firstly by Vingegaard and then by the relentless, indefatigable man in yellow, who matched his six stage wins from the Giro with six over the border in France.

Pogacar is the first rider since the late Italian climber Marco Pantani in 1998 to do the Giro-Tour double and only the eighth in history to reach the feat.

“Maybe some people thought the Giro was a safety net for me if I didn’t win the Tour," Pogacar said. "And for sure, it would have been an incredible year [just to win the Giro]. But to win the Tour is another level – and to win both together, is another level above that level.”

Asked what he was targeting next in a season that has already seen him stage atop the podium on 21 occasions, securing both the pink and yellow jerseys as well as one of cycling’s Monuments, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Pogacar said: “[Mathieu] van der Poel looks really good in the world champion’s jersey, but I want to take it from him. I want to have the rainbow jersey on my back – but I still have time for that.”

Before the World Championships there is the small matter of the Olympic Games road race, for which the Slovenian superstar will be one of the favourites given his current form.

The outgoing Olympic champion, Richard Carapaz of Ecuador, will not defend his title despite the 31-year-old’s record-breaking Tour. Carapaz became the first rider from Ecuador to don the leader’s yellow jersey in the opening week before becoming the first Ecuadorian to win a stage in the Tour last week, in so doing completing his grand slam of stage wins from all three of cycling’s Grand Tours.

A series of strong performances in the Alps also saw Carapaz become his nation's first winner of the Tour’s famous polka dot jersey.

Cycling’s global reach has indeed been on display at the 111th edition of the Tour with riders from three different continents winning the four classification jerseys. On top of Pogacar’s yellow, Evenepoel’s white, and Carapaz’s polka dot jerseys, triple stage winner Biniam Girmay (Intermarche-Wanty) of Eritrea became the first African winner of the green jersey.

Girmay, whose opening win in Stage 4 was the first for a black African rider, completed the final time trial safely to confirm his slender victory over last year’s green jersey, the Belgian Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck), who recovered from a testing start to match Girmay’s three wins.

But the last word went to Pogacar, who paid tribute to the two men either side of him on the final podium, describing their battles as “crazy” and the race itself as “one of the craziest in history,” while commiserating with countryman Roglic, who crashed out of the race in the second week.

Pogacar also singled out Cavendish for his lifetime achievement. “This was incredible,” he said of the Manx Missile’s 35 stage wins. A record which, if the swashbuckling Slovenian keeps up his current strike rate, he could well beat.