Pogačar Just Joined Cycling's Most Exclusive Club

Only four men in the history of the Tour de France had ever won it five times. In July 2026, Tadej Pogačar became the fifth, and he did it in a race that got disrupted by wildfires before he'd even reached the finish line.

Joining Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, and Induráin

Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Induráin had shared the record of five Tour victories since the 1990s, a list so exclusive that plenty of legitimately great champions of the sport never got within shouting distance of it.

Pogačar's fifth win put him level with all four, a genuinely historic marker in a race that's been run since 1903. He finished the overall general classification almost six and a half minutes clear of Belgium's Remco Evenepoel, a comfortable enough margin that the drama of the race had mostly settled well before the final stage in Paris.

Started Winning Absurdly Young

Pogačar won his first Tour de France back in 2020 at just 21 years old, becoming one of the youngest overall champions in the modern history of the race and immediately marking himself as a generational talent rather than a one-off surprise winner. That head start matters enormously for how his career gets measured against the sport's other five-time champions, all of whom needed considerably longer careers to reach the same number.

Merckx, often considered cycling's greatest ever rider, won his fifth Tour at 29. Pogačar reached the same number while still short of his 28th birthday, with no obvious signs of decline and rivals who remain a genuine step behind him on the biggest climbs.

A Final Stage Shortened by Wildfires

That final stage itself became a strange footnote to an otherwise dominant tour. Organizers shortened the route because police and security resources originally assigned to the race got reassigned to help fight wildfires burning across southwest France, a reminder that even cycling's most tradition bound event still has to bend to real world emergencies happening around it.

The shortened stage was won by Dutch rider Mathieu van der Poel, while Pogačar simply had to finish safely to lock in the overall title he'd already all but secured over the previous three weeks of racing.

What Separates a Fifth Win From a First

Winning the Tour once already places a rider among the sport's elite. Winning it five times requires surviving three weeks of racing across two decades' worth of rivals, terrain, and bad luck without a single career-ending crash or off year derailing the count.

Pogačar has now done it against a era stacked with legitimate rivals in Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard, not against a thin field, which is part of why comparisons to the sport's all time greats have shifted from speculative to genuinely serious. He's still only in his late twenties, young enough that a sixth win, something no man in the race's history has ever managed, is no longer a hypothetical fans dismiss out of hand.

Records like this tend to get discussed long after the rider who set them has retired. Pogačar just made his case to be mentioned alongside Merckx as the best to ever do it, and he's not even close to finished racing.