One of the best riders of the 2025 season was missing from
the biggest race on the calendar. Who are we talking about? Mads Pedersen of
course, the Lidl-Trek rider who has racked up victories and podiums across the
calendar this year,but wasn’t at the
Tour de France. Fans noticed. Pedersen noticed, too, watching the final stage
of the Tour not from the peloton, but from home.
“I trained for the last few stages myself, so I watched
the finales,” he said on the Lang Distance podcast. “But I really had
to see this one, especially when I saw the weather forecast.” It was the
final day of the Tour, a rain-slicked circuit race in Paris that featured three
climbs up Montmartre for the very first time. And on that brutal terrain, Wout
van Aert delivered a dominant solo win, dropping overall winner Tadej Pogacar
and blowing apart the field in front of a soaked Parisian crowd.
“It was an insane stage,” Pedersen said. “We
knew from the moment they first reached Montmartre that it was going to be a
madhouse. And the rain made it a completely insane cycling race.”
For a rider like Pedersen, the scene in Paris was bittersweet,
as he had the form to be there. The 29-year-old won four stages at the Giro
d’Italia in May and walked away with the points jersey, beating Van Aert on
many occasions. He also climbed onto the podium at both the Tour of Flanders
and Paris-Roubaix in the spring, cementing his place as one of the most
versatile riders in the peloton. Still, he was left off Lidl-Trek’s Tour de
France team.
Instead, the team selected Jonathan Milan as its sprint
leader and Mattias Skjelmose for the general classification. Milan delivered in
emphatic fashion, winning two stages and claiming the green jersey, but
Skjelmose was less fortunate, forced to abandon the race before the final week.
With Milan’s triumph in the points competition, Lidl-Trek secured its second
consecutive Grand Tour green jersey after Pedersen’s in the Giro, and a chance
now looms to make it three for three.
Pedersen will lead the team at the Vuelta a España, where
he’ll look to complete the hat-trick in points classifications across all three
Grand Tours. That campaign begins next month in Spain. After being left off the
Tour squad, Pedersen’s motivation is clear, and he’s already thinking about
what it will be like to return to the Tour de France stage in the future.
“I hope it’s the same when I return to the Tour,”
he said. For a rider who has made a habit of winning, let’s hope he can be on
the start line next July.