{"id":678926,"date":"2026-07-07T17:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T17:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/678926\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T17:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T17:55:09","slug":"tour-de-france-2026-mads-pedersen-wins-stage-as-tadej-pogacar-loses-yellow-jersey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/678926\/","title":{"rendered":"Tour de France 2026: Mads Pedersen wins stage as Tadej Pogacar loses yellow jersey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mads Pedersen sprinted clear from a breakaway to win the fourth stage of the Tour de France as defending champion Tadej Pogacar lost the yellow jersey and slipped to fourth.<\/p>\n

Dane Pedersen timed his run for the line at the end of the 181.9km stage to perfection as temperatures reached 40C in southern France.<\/p>\n

Uno-X Mobility rider Torstein Traeen is the new race leader after finishing eighth in the stage – almost 13 minutes ahead of the peloton.<\/p>\n

Pedersen’s Lidl-Trek team-mate \u2060Quinn Simmons \u200cwas second on the road, as the route took the riders from Carcassonne to Foix, with Movistar’s Raul Garcia Pierna third.<\/p>\n

Four-time champion Pogacar – who loses the yellow jersey<\/a> after just one day for the third year in a row – was 33rd in the stage and trails the new leader by seven minutes 53 seconds.<\/p>\n

Riders put blocks of ice down their tops as they battled the severe heat that has hit southern Europe this week.<\/p>\n

The pack were allowed to carry bags of ice and water instead of individual bottles as an experiment.<\/p>\n

Traeen – the third Norwegian to wear yellow – was treated for cancer in 2022., external<\/a><\/p>\n

He is not considered a major contender for the overall Tour title but was emotional on the podium.<\/p>\n

“It’s quite hard for me to understand how big this is, but you can see from the faces of my old coach how special it is,” Traeen said.<\/p>\n

“You don’t really understand what’s going on, maybe in a couple of days it sinks in, but for now I’ll just have to enjoy it.<\/p>\n

“I saw the guys in my team from the podium, you can see how happy they are, it’s always emotional.”<\/p>\n

Pedersen said everyone involved in his team helped with efforts to keep him cool.<\/p>\n

“We just have to live with the heat, and do what you can to cool down,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Luckily, the cars in the breakaway are closer to us than in the bunch, and that makes things easier.<\/p>\n

“When we are talking about team effort, we are not talking of riders only – there are many people of our team on the roadside, waiting to give bottles and ice sockets to help us deal with the heat.”<\/p>\n

Stage five on Wednesday is a mostly flat route suiting sprinters, before the race hits the high Pyrenees mountains on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mads Pedersen sprinted clear from a breakaway to win the fourth stage of the Tour de France as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-678926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}