The fifth stage of Le Tour de France, the world’s toughest cycling race, was raced overnight.
Two-time defending champion Tadej Pogačar is now the race’s overall leader.
If you have little to no understanding of what that means, don’t worry!
We thought it’d be helpful to give you an update and a bit of an explainer as to how it all works.
Who's involved?
This edition of the tour started with 184 riders. Every rider is part of an 8-man team, and 23 teams are competing.
Although cycling may seem like an individual sport (there are no tandem bikes here, as much as we’d all love to see that), winning the Tour requires lots of teamwork.
Each team elects at least one leader, and the other riders (‘domestiques’) work together to protect their leader’s position in the race, often letting their leader almost literally ride on their coattails so they can preserve energy.
How to win
The winner of the Tour is the cyclist with the lowest accumulated time after 21 stages.
The leaderboard for the lowest accumulated time is called the general classification (GC).
The yellow jersey is worn by the GC leader after each stage and kept by the overall leader at the end as the competitors ride into Paris, where the final stage concludes after three weeks of racing.
Other winners
The yellow jersey is the most sought-after prize of the Tour, but it is not the only symbolic jersey on offer.
The green jersey is worn by the leader of the points classification.
Every day of the tour has a certain number of ‘points’ on offer, with flat, long days holding the most points and shorter hill climbs with less.
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As a result, sprinters usually win this jersey because of how many points are on offer for nailing the stages featuring a decisive sprint.
The polka-dot jersey is awarded to the leader of the mountains classification.
Each mountain climb portion of a stage is allocated a certain number of points, based primarily on its classification from easy to extremely hard. Riders who finish in the first ten positions at the top of a climb score points, and the rider with the most ‘mountain climb points’ wears the polka-dot jersey.
The white jersey is awarded to the rider under the age of 26 who is highest in the general classification.
This year
Slovenian rider Tadej Pogačar, who won the tour in 2021, 2022, and 2024, is the favourite to win this year’s race.
Pogačar took the overall lead last night after finishing second in Stage 5, which was a 33-kilometre individual time trial that began and ended in the French city of Caen.
An individual time trial sees cyclists ride a course one by one, with the fastest to complete the course being crowned the stage winner.
After last night’s performance, Pogačar will start Stage 6 in the yellow jersey with a 16-second lead over second-placed Belgian cyclist and Stage 5 winner Remco Evenepoel.
Two-time tour champion Jonas Vingegaard, the most likely candidate to challenge Pogačar in this year’s tour, is one minute and 13 seconds behind Pogačar.
Stage 6 begins tonight at 8:30pm. You can watch the tour on SBS.
Women's tour
There is a women’s version of the race called Tour de France Femmes.
This year’s Tour de France Femmes will begin on 26 July.
The women’s race is considerably shorter than the men’s and only features nine stages.
The defending champion is Polish rider Katarzyna Niewiadoma. In 2024, she beat Dutch rider and 2023 champion Demi Vollering by just four seconds.
