L’ALPE D’HUEZ: Tadej Pogacar all but sealed a record-equalling fifth Tour de France title on Saturday as Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz won the 20th stage on Alpe d’Huez.

With Sunday’s 21st and final stage of the 113th edition of the Tour likely to be the usual procession around Paris, Pogacar will need only to cross the finish line to secure a fifth Tour title in seven years.

“Let’s arrive in Paris and then we can celebrate this yellow jersey,” said Pogacar.

The 27-year-old Slovenian will join cycling greats Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain as the only riders to have won the sport’s greatest race five times.

But Pogacar will be the youngest to have done so.

He crossed the finishing line on Saturday fourth, arm-in-arm with team-mate Isaac Del Toro, who had done enough to ensure third place overall and victory in the best young rider’s white jersey category ahead of French teenage ace Paul Seixas.

Pogacar even had the luxury of letting Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who finished second in the stage ahead of American Sepp Kuss in third, snare back around 40 seconds in the overall standings.

Pogacar leads Evenepoel by 6min 26sec going into Sunday’s finale, with 22-year-old Del Toro third at 9:42.

Carapaz won his second stage in three days and also secured the King of the Mountains polkadot jersey as he finished eighth overall.

“It was great to win here with a commemorative jersey,” said Carapaz. “In the end, it’s been a dream Tour.”

But it was agony for Kuss who was leading the Ecuadorian by around 15-20 seconds before crashing twice in the final 7km.

The second time, he was only saved from a fatal fall into a ravine by safety netting on the outside of a tight bend on a cliff-hugging mountain pass.

Kuss battled gamely to the end but was even passed by Evenepoel as Carapaz won the brutal 170.9km Queen stage of the race, which included four monstrous climbs.

Carapaz had started the day foraging off in search of the mountain points he would need to secure the polkadot jersey.

And he did so by taking maximum points atop the Col de la Croix de Fer, Col du Telegraphe and Col du Galibier.

He had been part of a five-man breakaway that was whittled down to a mano-a-mano between himself and Kuss.

The American had stolen a march to crest the final categorised climb, the Col de Sarenne 15km from the finish, around 10 seconds ahead of Carapaz.

But he came undone on a downhill section, crashing at the exit of a tunnel and then going down again just over a kilometre later.

As he climbed back on his bike, Carapaz whizzed past and Kuss’s hopes of salvaging something from this Tour for his Visma-Lease a Bike team — who had lost leader Jonas Vingegaard to a crash last week — went up in smoke.

Behind the pair, Seixas launched a bid to overhaul a 24-second gap to Del Toro in the white jersey competition but he clearly did not have the legs and when the Mexican counter-attacked, he immediately distanced his French rival.

Seixas battled hard to preserve his fourth place as fifth-placed compatriot Lenny Martinez had managed to follow Del Toro, Pogacar and Evenepoel on the Sarenne climb.

Seixas crossed the finish line in 10th, 2:55 after Carapaz and 1:48 behind Martinez.

That was enough to keep his fourth place, more than a minute ahead of Martinez, on what has been an astonishing Grand Tour debut for a 19-year-old.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2026