Will Tadej Pogačar beat Mark Cavendish’s Tour de France stage wins record? Crunching the numbers

Whether he intends to or not, Tadej Pogačar is a man who breaks records. His dominant win rate in all kinds of races, from Grand Tours to Monuments, has placed him not only on several pages of the metaphorical history books, but well within the conversation of being the most successful male rider of all time.

He’s the first rider to win a Monument five times in a row, the first man to stand on the podium of all five Monuments in the same season, and the first to podium in the sport’s 10 most important stage races. This year, he is within touching distant of matching the record of Tour de France GC victories, should he win his fifth and join the small, legendary group of five-time winners.

And on Monday, he took himself one place closer to one of the sport’s most talked-about records, the Tour de France stage wins tally. Winning his 22nd Tour stage atop the climb to Les Angles on stage 3, he now ranks joint fifth in the list of most prolific stage winners, joint with Andre Darrigade and behind only André Leducq, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx and Mark Cavendish.

The current record belongs to Mark Cavendish, with 35 stage wins, which he set in 2024, finally beating Eddy Merckx’s record of 34, which Cavendish had matched in 2021. Prior to 2024, Merckx had held the record since 1975, so for nearly 40 years.

Could Pogačar beat the record again, just a few years after Cavendish lifted it by one? As of Monday, he has 22 stages to his name, 13 off Cavendish’s tally and 14 off an outright record.

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Now, 14 might sound like a way to go, but if you look at his win rate so far, the stages per race he’d have to win now to reach 35 or 36 all-time wins, and indeed the number of Tours he’s likely to race in the future, the record becomes much closer – and clearly very achievable.

Current win rate

As of 2025, Pogačar had won 21 stages in six editions of the Tour, giving him an average win rate of 3.5 per edition. Only in one edition has he won fewer than three stages, the fateful ‘I’m gone, I’m dead’ year of 2023. Most frequently he’s won three stages, in 2024 he won six, and in 2025 he won four. So it’s not crazy to suggest that he could go on winning at least three per year.

How does that compare to the men he is up against in the history books? Fairly favourably, actually. It’s the same stage win per year average as Bernard Hinault (third in the rankings of most stage wins, with 28) and well above André Leducq and André Darrigade, the men he’s set to leapfrog quite quickly in the standings.

Crucially, 3.5 wins per edition is also a solid one win per edition more than the current outright record holder Mark Cavendish, who won 36 stages, but took 15 editions to do it. Pogačar is much more efficient.

But, if recent history is anything to go by, Pogačar these days is capable of winning much more than three stages per year. If he wins four this year and in the next editions, he’d reach 33 in 2028 and break the record in 2029. Make it five or six per year, which he achieved in both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour in 2024, and he’ll have the record in the bag in 2028.

The main question, of course, is how many stages Pogačar will win, but there’s also a question of how long he will go on for. His current contract runs until 2030, and despite his occasional grumble about maybe stopping earlier, perhaps after the 2028 Olympics or the potential Slovenian Grand Départ in 2029, he and the team have said he will honour that contract.

But going much beyond 2030 does seem fairly unlikely, with UAE head of performance recently telling us that he probably won’t race into his mid-30s, and that his retirement will be “earlier than other athletes have traditionally done in the past”. So most likely, Pogačar has this Tour and probably four more to chase the stage wins record.

Another way to compare Pogačar’s current statistics to the record holders he is up against is to look at age, and the graph below shows how many Tour stage wins each rider had achieved when they turned 28 (that’s the age Pogačar will turn later this summer, so his number of wins will almost certainly be higher once his birthday actually arrives). So by this metric, again, Pogačar is doing pretty well, he’s on track with the riders he is competing against.

Does he care?

‘Giving away’ the stage win on stage 2 potentially confirms that narrative, as surely a man obsessed with a win tally would grab every victory he could, not hand some off to teammates. But there could also be a sense of security with Pogačar: he knows he can give away a win here and there, because his win rate will be high enough as it is.

Personally, I don’t think it’s an obsession or a driving force just yet, but the more records Pogačar ticks off, like if he reaches yellow jersey number five or six, the chance to become the stage win record holder too will become more and more tantalising. It just depends if he can get close enough before he wants to hang up his wheels all together.

All of Tadej Pogačar’s Tour de France stage winsStage 9, 2020Stage 15, 2020Stage 20 (ITT), 2020Stage 5 (ITT), 2021Stage 17, 2021Stage 18, 2021Stage 6, 2022Stage 7, 2022Stage 17, 2022Stage 6, 2023Stage 20, 2023Stage 4, 2024Stage 14, 2024Stage 15, 2024Stage 19, 2024Stage 20, 2024Stage 21 (ITT), 2024Stage 4, 2025Stage 7, 2025Stage 12, 2025Stage 13 (ITT), 2025Stage 3, 2026

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