Tour de France stage finish infiltrator handed eight-month suspended prison sentence

The man who tried to ride through the finish line of a Tour de France stage minutes before the arrival of the sprinters on stage 17 has been handed an eight-month suspended prison sentence.

AFP confirmed the news on Friday, two days after the infiltrator created a dramatic scene in a rainy Valence, as the man born in 1994 was taken to the ground following attempts by Tour de France organiser ASO and French riot police.

After successfully stopping him, he was arrested on Wednesday before being taken into custody.

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He had attempted to complete the finale of the stage just prior to Jonathan Milan’s victory, with several Tour photographers capturing the moment he was shoulder-checked to the ground, wearing a Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale jersey and black helmet.

Prosecutor Laurent de Caigny said that he was sentenced for: “entering a sports competition area and disrupting the competition, refusing to comply and assaulting a person in a position of public authority.”

Alongside his suspended sentence, the man was also banned from entering any sports venue for five years, having already “been convicted three times”, the prosecutor added in AFP’s report.

His final punishment was to pay €500 in damages to the police officer, a member of the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite (CRS), who fell to the ground while attempting to stop him at the finish line.

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The race-invader on stage 17 was not the first incident of the 2025 race where officials were forced to stop someone near the finish line, with ASO’s general commissioner Stéphane Boury already having to step in at the finish of stage 11 in Toulouse.

In the earlier case, Boury pushed a protester on foot out of the way just as stage winner Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility) and breakaway companion Mauro Schmid (Jayco-AlUla) were arriving at the line.

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