Tadej Pogacar turns the tables on Mathieu van der Poel to win stage 4 of 2025 Tour de France

Tadej Pogacar has turned the tables on Mathieu van der Poel to win stage 4 of the 2025 Tour de France in a thrilling finale and secure the 18th stage win of his Tour career in style.

After the trio of Lenny Martinez (Bahrain - Victorious), Thomas Gachignard (Team TotalEnergies) and Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility) had attacked early to form a three man breakaway, EF Education-EasyPost's Kasper Asgreen countered from the peloton, bridging the gap to the leaders and increasing the number of the break to four at the front.

With the peloton settling into the now familiar format of keeping the breakaway at around the two minute mark, the race calmed for a while, in preparation for the challenging and punchy parcours towards the end of the day.

Either side of the 50km to go mark however, a pair of crashes rocked the peloton. The first saw Sepp Kuss among the riders caught up, whilst the second saw Cees Bol and Ilan van Wilder going down.

At the first KoM of the day, the break started to attack itself in search of points towards the polka-dots. In the end though, it was Asgreen who took the sole point offer atop the Cat 4 Côte Jacques Anquetil, holding off a late sprint from Martinez. With the peloton already only around 1:20 down the road however, the break's time was out front was looking numbered.

At the intermediate sprint with just over 30km to go, the breakaway swept up the first four places, with Jonathan Milan extending his lead over Biniam Girmay in the Green Jersey classification by leading the peloton over.

On the next climb, the Cat 3 Côte de Belbeuf, Lenny Martinez exploded away from the rest of the breakaway taking maximum points on offer, as a newly-UAE led peloton swept up Abrahamsen, Asgreen and Gachignard, allowing the current KoM leader Tim Wellens to pick up the 1 point on offer behind Martinez.

With 25km to go, there was then another crash in the peloton as Valentin Paret-Peintre, Oscar Onley, and Harold Tejada among the casualties. The front of the peloton kept on riding though, and right at the bottom of the next climb, Martinez was caught by the bunch with just over 20km to go.

As the teams of Alpecin-Deceuninck, UAE Team Emirates - XRG and Team Visma | Lease a Bike then fought for position at the front, each raising the pace to get infront of the other, the peloton was a much diminished one as it entered the final 10km of the day.

Visma's Victor Campenaerts did a monster pull on the front towards the final climb of the day, setting things up for a seemingly imminent attack by Jonas Vingegaard. Once Campenaerts pulled over though, Visma were swamped by UAE duo Jhonatan Narvaez and Joao Almeida, with Tadej Pogacar lurking dangerously on the Portuguese's wheel. With 5.4 km to go, Pogacar then made his move, quickly followed by Vingegaard, as the pair distanced all the rest of the Tour de France.

As Pogacar continued to step on the pedals though, Vingegaard too began to struggle, before finding a second wind and incredibly closing the gap before the top of the climb. With 5km still to go though, Pogacar and Vingegaard were alone at the front of the race.

Impressively, Remco Evenepoel had was doing a monster pull in the chase group, closing the gap and bringing Matteo Jorgenson, Mathieu van der Poel, Oscar Onley and Joao Almeida along with him to Pogacar and Vingegaard.

Evenepoel then tried to catch the rest unawares with an attack, but Almeida quickly closed things down, just as he did with a counter from Jorgenson moments later. Then, in the final kick for the finish line, Van der Poel was the first to go, but this time Pogacar came around for the stage win.