Race leader Tadej Pogacar has abandoned the Vuelta a Espana after crashing during stage eight.<\/p>\n
The world champion, who was looking to complete a full set of Grand Tour victories, crashed with about 33km to go.<\/p>\n
Pogacar, 27, was riding in the midst of the peloton when he came off his bike, hurting his left shoulder and cutting the left side of his face.<\/p>\n
The Slovenian appeared to try and get back on his bike before sitting back down again.<\/p>\n
He then walked unaided into an ambulance to mark the first time he has abandoned a Grand Tour.<\/p>\n
The overwhelming favourite to win the three-week long race had started the stage three minutes and 50 seconds clear of Spaniard Enric Mas in second place.<\/p>\n
In what was a chaotic race, another crash occurred in the finishing straight as France’s Bryan Coquard claimed his first stage win in a Grand Tour.<\/p>\n
The 34-year-old edged Lidl-Trek rider Mads Pedersen in a photo finish.<\/p>\n
“I think it has been 13 years, it has been a lot of work and I have finished second a lot of times,” Coquard told TNT Sports.<\/p>\n
“I have not been in good positions in the first two sprints, I know I have good legs. Maybe I climb better now, I am fast again.”<\/p>\n
Mas now leads the general classification by one minute and 11 seconds from Decathlon CMA CGM rider Felix Gall.<\/p>\n
Six-time Grand Tour winner Pogacar was on course to win all three of the sport’s biggest stage races, having already won five Tours de France and a Giro d’Italia.<\/p>\n
Having become the joint most successful Tour de France champion of all time last month, the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider is aiming to become the ninth rider to win all three Grand Tours.<\/p>\n
Pogacar has also won almost all of the sport’s biggest races. In addition to his multiple stage race victories, the two-time road world champion has won 13 one-day monument races, including the Tour of Flanders (three times), Milan-San Remo (once), Il Lombardia (five times) and Liege-Bastogne-Liege (four times).<\/p>\n
In 2025, he recorded his best finish of second in the other monument – Paris-Roubaix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Race leader Tadej Pogacar has abandoned the Vuelta a Espana after crashing during stage eight. The world champion,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-753779","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\/753779","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=753779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}