Tom Pidcock surges up standings while Mauro Schmid wins Tour de France stage 13

Tom Pidcock leapt up the overall standings in the Tour de France, briefly climbing as high as second place, after a fulminating stage to Belfort ended in a debut Tour win for Swiss professional Mauro Schmid.

Pidcock was one of the key instigators of a mass breakaway that formed on the rolling roads of the Jura and Doubs, on the long approach to the 9km climb of the Ballon d’Alsace, overlooking Belfort.

A stage that the race leader, Tadej Pogacar, had described as “weird”, produced an unexpected outcome as Pidcock, who had started the day 7min 43sec behind Remco Evenepoel, moved into fourth place overall, only nine seconds behind the Belgian.

“It was always the objective to make it into break,” the double Olympic gold medallist said. “I think it worked out perfectly. I was also after the stage win, but it was difficult in the end without any teammates. But I can’t be disappointed.”

Pogacar meanwhile is edging closer to a fifth Tour de France win, which would officially tie him with the other five-time winners – Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin.

Lance Armstrong won seven Tours before being stripped of them all for doping.

Asked whether he considered the record for Tour wins to be five or seven, Pogacar smiled and batted the question away. “I got this question in the morning,” he said. “I can’t say anything. I don’t go for records, I just want to finish this Tour with yellow in Paris. This is the main focus.”

The longest stage of the 2026 Tour was another fast and furious race and for once the breakaway did succeed. A third of the peloton was unleashed on the rolling road to the Ballon d’Alsace as Pogacar and his UAE Emirates XRG team finally loosened their grip on the peloton.

Exhibiting the first signs of fatigue immediately after the stage finish, a red-eyed Pogacar described the peloton as “flying”.

The biggest winner of the original group of 37 that grew to more than 50, but finally dwindled once they entered the climbs of the Vosges, was Pidcock, who also took third place in the sprint finish, behind Schmid.

Pidcock’s uneven Tour has seen him almost win in Ussel, crash into a parked car in Le Lioran and hover on the edge of the top 10 but he is now clearly becoming more competitive as the race continues and can reasonably start to contemplate a top-five result.

For a rider who in the past had admitted that he finds the demands of the three-week Tour mentally draining, Pidcock has found his focus at just the right moment. A stage winner on Alpe d’Huez in 2022, Pidcock faces five days of racing before the peloton returns there on 24 and 25 July for back-to-back stage finishes.

The high speeds and mass break on the road to Belfort were further indications of how the absence of many sprint stages has impacted the race. “Everyone’s looking for opportunities because they are few and far between,” the Netcompany Ineos director of racing, Geraint Thomas, said. “Obviously the Paris stage has changed now and it does put more emphasis on the sprinter days.”

Even so, there is a feeling that some in the peloton have also been keeping their powder dry for the intimidating final week, which includes five summit finishes, the first two of which come this weekend at Le Markstein and the Plateau de Solaison.

“In the earlier stages you definitely saw that, when there was only one rider even trying,” the EF Education Easy Post sports director, Charly Wegelius, said. “That told a story about the fatigue and what was coming down the road.”

With so many of the Tour’s stages favouring Pogacar and his UAE team, Wegelius said that there was a realisation that “so-called medium mountain stages could be out of reach and lumpy sprint days have become quite hotly-contested”.

Pidcock’s elevation to a higher ranking overall has also created a further headache for second placed Jonas Vingegaard, who now has to monitor riders from four different teams: Evenepoel, with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Pinarello Q36.5 and Pidcock, Juan Ayuso of Lidl-Trek and French teenager Paul Seixas, riding for Decathlon CMA CGM, as the race heads into a tough weekend of mountain racing in the Vosges.