Tadej Pogacar wrapped up the Crit\u00e9rium du Dauphin\u00e9 on Sunday with a podium finish in the eighth and final stage, which was won by France\u2019s Lenny Martinez.<\/p>\n
A winner of three stages in total, the Slovene dominated the 77th edition of the Dauphine to top the overall classification by 59sec ahead of the Dane Jonas Vingegaard \u2013 three weeks before the start of his Tour de France title defence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a really amazing week,\u201d Pogacar said. \u201cOnce again today, the team did a great job. We managed to defend the [yellow] jersey and we can go home happy and prepare for the Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n
The German Florian Lipowitz completed the podium, 2min 38sec behind Pogacar, while Belgium\u2019s Remco Evenepoel came fourth at 4:21.<\/p>\n
Sunday\u2019s final stage was a 133.3km mountainous trek from Val-d\u2019Arc to Val-Cenis, with an uphill finish at the Plateau du Mont-Cenis. The 21-year-old Martinez caught the Spaniard Enric Mas with 8km to go to give France its first victory in this Dauphin\u00e9, finishing 34sec ahead of Vingegaard and Pogacar.<\/p>\n
Vingegaard tried to catch Martinez but was unable to shake off Pogacar. The Dane and the Slovenian then stopped attacking and rolled in together. Pogacar now has 99 victories to his name, a record for an active rider at just 26 years of age.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of positives from this week and we turned all the negatives into positives, so it\u2019s all good,\u201d said Pogacar, who bounced back from a poor time-trial performance in stage four to lay down the gauntlet to his principal Tour rivals. \u201cThere\u2019s not much to do ahead of the Tour. I rest a bit, maybe some extra work for the time trial, and then I\u2019m ready,\u201d the three-time Tour winner added.<\/p>\n
The 2025 Tour de France runs from 5-27 July, with Pogacar the firm favourite after his first Dauphin\u00e9 crown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tadej Pogacar wrapped up the Crit\u00e9rium du Dauphin\u00e9 on Sunday with a podium finish in the eighth and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-187872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114690718667270340","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}