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Olav Kooij, teammate to Paul Seixas at Decathlon CMA CGM, emerged out of the heat haze in Pau to win stage five in the Place de Verdun. The first sprint finish in the 2026 Tour de France saw Kooij, who won three stages in last year’s Tour of Britain, win with ease from Max Kanter of XDA Astana.
“After a couple [of] hard days already, we had to wait to today to get this first chance to sprint in the Tour, and to immediately win is unbelievable,” the Dutch rider said. “It means quite a lot. I had a pretty tough spring, and I think just to get back to this level and to keep believing in yourself – and just a few people who believe in you as well – is all you need.”
In one of the few sprint stages in this year’s race, the fight for positioning was intense with crashes in the final kilometres delaying race leader, Torsten Træen. Despite his mishap, there was no change to the Norwegian rider’s overall lead.
On an other long, hot afternoon, characterised by ice vests, ice socks and plenty of water-cooled helmets, Baptiste Veistroffer was the sole aggressor. For the Tour debutant it was a baptism of fire, with the Breton ploughing a solitary furrow over the hot tarmac for almost 140km.
His lone break came to an end soon after he had hauled himself over the day’s only climb, the Cote de Baleix, and the peloton swallowed him up, with just 14km to race.
For the Olympic road race champion, Remco Evenepoel, Thursday’s stage to Gavanie-Gedre marks a return to the Tourmalet, the long, steep climb that was the scene of his humiliating abandon from the Tour in 2025. The double gold medallist has made a solid start to the Tour but has not yet been discussed in the same breathless terms as Seixas or Isaac del Toro.
Yet as a former third place finisher and winner of the Vuelta a Espana, he remains a strong contender for a podium place in Paris. The Belgian has lost four kilos while preparing for the Tour and expects a different outcome for his return to the Tourmalet.
Now 26, Evenepoel, master of the punchy soundbite, leads the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team alongside his quietly spoken German teammate Florian Lipowitz, who finished third overall in 2025.
It is a big money collaboration that has failed to set the sport on fire. Questions over whether he and Lipowitz can in fact work together have brought a prickly response from the often outspoken Evenepoel.
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“I know where you want to go,” he said in response to one question. “You want to hear me say I want to be on the podium and hear Florian say he wants to be on the podium. Of course we want to be on the podium, but if we do it in a good way without this negative energy, it’s good for both of us and for the team.”
Still, even his team doesn’t seem clear on leadership duties. “Remco is still the team leader and Florian Lipowitz is a bit of the second man but in terms of sporting performance, they are on equal footing,” Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team manager Ralph Denk said, before adding that “they will have to fight it out between themselves on the road.”
With Træen safely ensconced in the yellow jersey, any “fighting it out” looks to be on hold, at least for now. But the expectation is that, unless Tadej Pogacar is plotting another of his solo attacks on the slopes of the Tourmalet, the favourites will be happy to keep their powder dry on the 17km climb
