{"id":556192,"date":"2026-07-23T19:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T19:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/556192\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T19:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T19:35:08","slug":"tour-de-france-worries-emerge-for-tadej-pogacar-after-illness-sweeps-through-team-tour-de-france-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/556192\/","title":{"rendered":"Tour de France worries emerge for Tadej Pogacar after illness sweeps through team | Tour de France 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Carapaz won stage 18 of the Tour de France<\/a> after a breakaway group of six riders duelled their way to the winter sports station at Orci\u00e8res-Merlette, but uncertainty surrounds the health of race leader Tadej Pogacar\u2019s UAE Team Emirates XRG, which has been swept by a virus since Monday\u2019s rest day.<\/p>\n

After Adam Yates\u2019s stage-long calvary on the road to Voiron, Pogacar\u2019s team was further weakened by the abandonment of his American colleague, Brandon McNulty, who quit the Tour with 21km of Thursday\u2019s stage remaining.<\/p>\n

Two more of Pogacar\u2019s teammates, Tim Wellens and Florian Vermeersch, also appeared to struggle at times during the stage, which included five categorised climbs, including the final seven-kilometre ascent to the finish.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the stage start in Voiron, Wellens suggested other riders within the team were unwell and revealed that he had a sore throat. Seen through the lens of Friday and Saturday\u2019s mountain-top finishes on Alpe d\u2019Huez, Pogacar, despite his 4m 32s lead over second-placed Remco Evenepoel, has reason to be worried.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sad that Brandon could not finish. We will see in the next two days but Adam is getting better, and tomorrow, we will go with the flow,\u201d Pogacar said. \u201cI think we can manage. It\u2019s the third week, all the teams are suffering. There are bodies everywhere on a stage like today. We will keep fighting and I believe we can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The full extent of any illness within UAE Team Emirates XRG was further speculated on by Pogacar\u2019s decision to swap his usual yellow shorts for black. McNulty\u2019s decision to stop may have been for other reasons too, though. He had also been nursing injuries sustained when he was hit by a car during his reconnaissance of Tuesday\u2019s time trial.<\/p>\n

There are two more tough mountain stages in the Alps before Sunday\u2019s final run into Paris. Photograph: St\u00e9phanie Lecocq\/Reuters<\/p>\n

The former Giro d\u2019Italia champion Carapaz, who won a mountain stage at nearby Superd\u00e9voluy<\/a> in 2024, narrowly avoided colliding with an errant fan earlier in the stage. The Ecuadorian recovered from that mid-race scare to win with a typically gutsy lone attack.<\/p>\n

On a stage in which the main favourites called a truce, those who had tried and failed to succeed from breakaways earlier in the race made one last-ditch bid for glory. That included the Geraint Thomas-directed Netcompany Ineos, which has yet to win a stage this year despite numerous attempts.<\/p>\n

Time is now running out and Thomas has described this Tour as \u201ctough going\u201d for the British team. So it proved once more, with Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman trying but failing to join the decisive move. The group that finally formed included Carapaz, but also Matteo Jorgenson, teammate to the now absent Jonas Vingegaard at Visma Lease-a-bike, and Mauro Schmid, already a stage winner for Jayco AlUla in Belfort.<\/p>\n

Richard Carapaz pours water on himself after winning stage 18. Photograph: Jeff Pachoud\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Carapaz has proven a very reliable performer in the Tour\u2019s mid-mountain stages, however, and once again he had enough power to distance his rivals in the final kilometres. The EF Education-EasyPost rider finished 45 seconds clear of both Schmid and Jorgenson. All eyes are now on this weekend\u2019s double-headed suffer-fest on the daunting Alpe d\u2019Huez, with a worried Pogacar looking, for the first time this year, almost vulnerable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Carapaz won stage 18 of the Tour de France after a breakaway group of six riders duelled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-556192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}