The 112th Tour de France stage after the first rest day saw frenetic action in its front half, Mathieu van der Poel crossing swords with Wout van Aerta breakaway surviving to claim the victory and Tadej Pogačar suffering a hard crash late. Jonas Abrahamsen outsprinted breakmate Mauro Schmid in Toulouse for the day’s flowers, his and his ProTeam Uno-X’s first Tour triumph. Ben Healy kept yellow. Michael Woods was top Canadian in 92nd.
The Course
The last 45 km of Wednesday was studded with Cat. 3 and 4 climbs and uncategorized climbs. It was a little Classic-y in this loop around Toulouse.
A trio bounced away early before the first Cat. 4 climb. At first, various chaps tried to join in to no avail–all the efforts to join prevented the threesome from rolling up a decent gap. Finally, at the midway point of the 156.8-km route, a quintet led the race. Wout van Aert and more fellows endeavoured to fuse with the five. Healy, Remco Evenepoel, Jonas Vingegaard and van der Poel tried to bridge, and all this energy momentarily split the peloton.
By the time fugitive Abrahamsen won the day’s intermediate sprint, his group was 50 seconds ahead of a van Aert-van der Poel quintet, the peloton having calmed down.
A group of 5 counter-attackers took advantage of the situation to escape. 💨💥#TDF2025 | #TDFLive
— Tour de France (@letourfr.bsky.social) 2025-07-16T13:45:54.498Z
Climb 2 was Côte de Montgiscard with 45 km to go, the peloton hitting it 2:20 after Abrahamsen and friends. Wout and Mathieu were half a minute behind, unable to close the gap on Côte de Corronsac.
Before penultimate climb Côte de Vieille-Toulouse, Abrahamsen, Schmid and the others continued to hold off the high-powered chase quintet. Quinn “American Try-er” Simmons attacked from the chase, prompting Abrahamsen and Schmid to take off.
The final climb was 900-metre, 9.1-percent Côte de Pech David. All three groups clambered up its steep ramps. Van der Poel attacked, slicing through everyone except the Norwegian-Swiss alliance out front.
In the yellow jersey group, sixth place Kévin Vauquelin made a big dig at Pech David’s foot. Matteo Jorgenson closed it up. Vingegaard attacked over the top, drawing Evenepoel and Pogačar. Stalemate once again.
Van der Poel continued to run down the leading duo. The final…
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