Richard Carapaz won stage 18 of the Tour de France after a breakaway group of six riders duelled their way to the winter sports station at Orcières-Merlette, but uncertainty surrounds the health of race leader Tadej Pogacar’s UAE Emirates XRG team, which has been swept by a virus since Monday’s rest day.
- Illness sweeping UAE Emirates XRG since the rest day has weakened Tadej Pogacar's support riders.
- Brandon McNulty abandoned the Tour, compounding concerns over team health and race-day strength.
- Tim Wellens and Florian Vermeersch visibly struggled; Wellens reported a sore throat and said others were unwell.
- Tadej Pogacar swapped yellow shorts for black, fuelling speculation about illness and vulnerability before Alpe d'Huez.
- Upcoming double mountain stages on Alpe d'Huez pose a major test; Tadej Pogacar's large lead may still be threatened.
After Adam Yates’s stage-long calvary on the road to Voiron, Pogacar’s team was further weakened by the abandonment of his American colleague, Brandon McNulty, who quit the Tour with 21km of the stage to Orcières-Merlette remaining.
Two more of Pogacar’s other teammates, Tim Wellens and Florian Vermeersch, also appeared to struggle at times during the stage, which included five categorised climbs, including the final seven-kilometre ascent to the finish.
Speaking at the stage start in Voiron, Wellens suggested that other riders within the team were unwell and revealed that he had a sore throat. Seen through the lens of Friday and Saturday’s mountain-top finishes on Alpe d’Huez, Pogacar, despite his healthy lead over second-placed Remco Evenepoel, has reason to be worried.
“I’m sad that Brandon could not finish. We will see in the next two days but Adam is getting better, and tomorrow, we will go with the flow,” Pogacar said. “I think we can manage. It’s the third week, all the teams are suffering. There are bodies everywhere, on a stage like today. We will keep fighting and I believe we can do it.”
The full extent of any illness within the UAE Emirates XRG team was further speculated on by the race leader’s decision to swap his habitual yellow shorts for black. But McNulty’s decision to stop may have been for other reasons too, as he had also been nursing injuries sustained when he was hit by a car during his reconnaissance of Tuesday’s time trial.
Former Giro d’Italia champion Carapaz, who won a mountain stage at nearby Superdévoluy in 2024, narrowly avoided colliding with an errant fan earlier in the stage, but recovered from that mid-race scare to win with a typically gutsy lone attack.
On a stage in which the main favourites called a truce, those who had tried and failed to succeed from breakaways earlier in the race made one last-ditch bid for glory. That included the Geraint Thomas-directed Netcompany Ineos team, which despite numerous attempts has yet to win a stage.
Time is now running out and Thomas has described this Tour as “tough going” for the British team. So it proved once more, with Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman, trying but failing, to join the decisive move. The group that finally formed included Carapaz, but also Matteo Jorgenson, teammate to the now absent former champion, Jonas Vingegaard, at Visma Lease-a-bike, and Mauro Schmid, already a stage winner for Jayco AlUla in Belfort.
But Carapaz has proven a very reliable performer in the Tour’s mid-mountain stages and once again he had enough power to distance his rivals in the final kilometres.
All eyes are now on this weekend’s double-headed suffer-fest on the daunting Alpe d’Huez, with a worried Pogacar looking, for the first time this year, almost vulnerable.
