The early verdict on the Tour de France may have sounded decisive, but the race is not automatically finished just because Tadej Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates struck twice in stages 2 and 3. That was the tension at the heart of the discussion around Tour De France Stage 6: impressive early control from a four-time Tour winner, but not yet a guaranteed conclusion to a three-week race.
Stage 2 brought a gift from Pogačar to his UAE teammate Isaac del Toro, before Stage 3 flipped the roles and Del Toro set up Pogačar for an easy winning sprint. It was enough to make TNT Sports commentators suggest the contest was already as good as over, with one description of Jonas Vingegaard leaving him looking “on his hands and knees”.
Why the race still feels alive
That reaction says as much about the authority of Pogačar as it does about the scale of the gap he appears to have opened in the opening days. When a rider of his calibre starts winning repeatedly, the instinct is to assume the rest of the race is a formality.
But the Tour de France is not decided in the first five or six stages. It is a three-week race, and early dominance does not remove the need for control, recovery and consistency. That is especially true when Jonas Vingegaard is still presented as the main rival.
Vingegaard and the danger of early conclusions
The suggestion that Vingegaard looked spent was strong, but it should be treated as a snapshot rather than a final sentence. The key question is not whether Pogačar has looked brilliant — he clearly has — but whether the race can sustain that level of certainty once the tougher phases arrive.
For now, the early stages have done two things at once. They have reinforced Pogačar’s status as the man to beat, and they have also created the kind of debate that always follows an early show of force: is this already over, or is the peloton still waiting for the race to properly start?
Tour De France Stage 6 sits inside that conversation. The evidence so far points strongly in Pogačar’s favour, but the very nature of the Tour means the final answer is still to come.
