The Tour in 10: Stage 3, Tour de France 2026

Hannah takes over today's episode to give a full recap of Stage 3 of the Tour de France 2026 and a preview of Stage 5. 

Transcript

hannah 0:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome to God's Medicine Cycling Podcast. I'm your host Hannah, and I am here solo today for the Tour in 10 to recap stage three and preview stage four of the 2026 Tour de France. Fret not, my co-host Lauren will be back with us later this week. Let's get into it. Stage three, Grenoyer to Les Angles, was a 195.9 kilometer mountain stage that started with a Cat three climb. As always, God's Medicine is a spoiler what? Spoiler first podcast, so everything from here on out is going to be a spoiler, including the stage results, which I am now going to read for you. First across the line, Tadej Pogačar wins what ultimately ended up being a GC sprint. Jonas Vingegaard finishes two seconds behind him on the same time as Richard Carapaz. Paul Seixas also got the same time and clocked in fourth. Tobias Haaland Johannessen was in fifth, and on the same time as him we had Lenny Van Eetvelt, Florian Lipowitz, Remco Evenepoel, Isaac Del Toro, and Juane Uso. Today's results shook up the GC just a little bit. Tadej Pogačar goes into yellow. Jonas is on the same time as him in second place. Remco Evenepoel is in third on 23 seconds. Isaac Del Toro is in fourth on 24 seconds. Juane Uso is in fifth on 27 seconds. Paul Seixas is in sixth place on 48 seconds. Florian Lipowitz is on 53, Lenny Martinez on 109, Tobias Haaland Johannessen on 111, and rounding out the top 10 is Ilan Van Wilder with 117. We love to see it here at God's Medicine. The King of the Mountains jersey took a bit of a turn today, and perhaps we started to see some of the real contenders there come to the fore. Alex Baudin, who spent a great day in the breakaway for EF Education EasyPost, now leads that classification with 12 points. Nicolas Prodhomme is behind him with nine points, and Raul Garcia Pierna has six points. So we will see Alex Baudin in polka dots tomorrow The green jersey standings look a lot like the GC standings right now because there were points on today's finish line. So Tadej Pogačar is in green with 55 points right now, Jonas Vingegaard with 44, Isaac del Toro with 39 points. Mads Pedersen moved himself into green jersey contention. He now has 37 points, and I'll go into how that happened in just a minute. And Remco Evenepoel has 33 points. Pedersen is the first sprinter to make inroads on the points jersey, and he will almost certainly try to further his lead in this category tomorrow. So how did everything shake out today, you ask? I'm here to tell you. Break formation took a really long time today. It took about an hour and a half of more or less constantly people attacking. We will simply never make it out of here if I go through all of the moves that happened. some things of note, Matteo Jorgenson for Visma Lease a Bike was very active during break formation. He was both jumping himself and he was also trying to close down anybody that Visma thought was dangerous. At one point, Tim Wellens had to just start marking him. We saw Arnaud De Lie, unfortunately for Lotto, drop out of the bunch very, very early, and he spent the whole day basically on OTL watch. At the time of recording, he has not yet crossed the line. I think that he will make the time cut, but it will be close. There was a crash on the Cat Three climb that started the day involving, perhaps most importantly, Bruno Armirail, who looked a little bit banged up when he got back on the bike. I think he did something to his right leg, and Matthew Riccò Tello, who also hit the deck. we will be keeping our eyes on both of them as they will be key players for Jonas Vingegaard and Polksaks later in the race The break of the day finally, finally established itself with around 126 kilometers left. We ended up with a really strong group of Mads Pedersen, Alex Baudin, Nicolas Prodhomme, Harold Tejada, Vlad van Mechelen, Louis Vervaeke, Luke Plapp, Mauro Schmid, Magnus Cort, George Bennett, Raul Garcia Pierna, Nelson Oliveira, Alex Aranburu, Clement Braz Alfonso, Michael Storer, Joris Delave, Matteo Verche, and Abel Balderstone. By virtue of being in this group, Mads Pedersen got himself in the perfect position for the intermediate sprint, which he rolled through completely unchallenged. got the 25 green jersey points that were on offer at that checkpoint. That was probably his main objective for the stage, so well done, Mads. You secured that bag. He is the, the only sprinter with big points on the board so far in the green jersey battle, as I mentioned earlier. Visma controlled this peloton after the main break went. They were the ones who kind of, when they saw that this was the group, took the heat off in the peloton. But then sort of inexplicably, they kept the break pegged somewhere between two and three minutes, which ultimately led to UAE taking over control after the intermediate sprint and starting to melt the breakaway's advantage down with the biggest climb of the day looming. Florian Vermeersch really did some damage in this phase of the race. Some of the guys in the breakaway clearly realized that this meant UAE was riding for the stage win and dropped back. We saw Mads Pedersen do this. The Jayco boys were all kind of in this same boat. Raul Garcia Pierna, on the other hand, decided it's time to attack. Absolute respect. He, he was followed by what ultimately would be a group of six riders. So we had Garcia Pierna, Baudin, Prodhomme, Bennett, Van Mechelen, and Verche who went up the road together. Baudin secured the King of the Mountains points over the biggest climb of the day, and this is the group that would sort of spend the rest of the day out front Baudan attacked that group with around 34 kilometers left. Prud'homme bridged to him on a climb, and the two of them rode together up until the second to last climb of the day, at which point Baudan secured the King of the Mountains jersey for EF. Prud'homme gave him a pat on the back, said, "Good job, my guy," and went back to the peloton, leaving Baudan sort of dangling out in front of the group by himself. It was doomed, unfortunately. It was a really strong ride for Baudan. He's in clearly great shape right now, so good for him, good for EF. But the peloton did catch him with about six kilometers left to go in the stage. All of the major GC players were present, most of them with teammates. We saw some really excellent domestique work from Quinn Simmons and Jai Hindley in particular, getting Ayuso, Lipowitz, and Evenepoel respectively into position. But who else was it ever gonna be except for Visma and UAE taking over for the final stretch of the stage? Sepp Kuss forced a really big acceleration in the group with one and a half kilometers left, and then Del Toro took control at the flamme rouge. And he really cranked it. He upped the tempo all the way to the finish when Tadej Pogacar attacked with around 200 meters left to go. Jonas was in his wheel when this happened, but had no response to the burst that Pogi put on, so Pogacar crossed the line solo to take the stage win and to move into the yellow jersey Tomorrow's Stage 4 is a one hundred and eighty-one point nine kilometer hilly stage with a sprint finish from Carcassonne to Foix. There are four categorized climbs. We have a Cat 4 Col de Baido, three point three kilometers at four point four percent, followed by a Cat 3 Col de Paradis, five point eight kilometers at four point one percent. The intermediate sprint is worth twenty-five green jersey points again, and this comes at the foot of the Cat 2 Col de Courant, which is ten point seven kilometers at five point five percent. We'll finish the vert for the day with another Cat 2, the Col de Montségur, six point nine kilometers at six point six percent. The Col de Montségur comes about 40 Ks from the finish, and from there we'll have a bit of descending leading into what will likely be a sprint finish at Foix. In total, there are 50 green jersey points available on the day. So what are we gonna be watching for? With that many green jersey points on offer and a fair amount of climbing, this could be a really good day for somebody like Mads Pedersen, somebody like Ma- Michael Matthews, Maybe Bini Girmay. We haven't really seen him. We saw him contest an intermediate sprint, but we haven't seen too much of him on the climbs. The camera was not on him today, so if he's in good shape, why not? the, the cat twos might be a bit much for the out-and-out sprinters. I like Philipsen for hilly stages in general. This w- this might be a little bit much for him. I think his teammate Mathieu van der Poel could contest. I don't know if Alpecin will be wanting to split up the green jersey points between their two leaders, but, it might be in their favor to sort of block somebody like Pedersen from getting 50 points on the day. So could happen, could not. Watch this space, I guess. Fred Wright said in an interview that he's targeting tomorrow's stage, so I imagine he'll certainly try to get in a move. I think, actually, probably quite a few of the Q36.5 guys could be trying to make moves for tomorrow. They had a lot of latitude today, and I think that they look like they're, you know, they're in the right places. I don't think any of them were particularly threatening for today. But tomorrow, tomorrow could be quite good for Fred Wright. Cort could also be a contender. He was pretty active today. So I think he's got the legs. He could be a good shout for tomorrow That is the Tour in 10 for today. Thank you for tuning in. We will be back tomorrow with our recap of stage four and preview of stage five, La Maison to Pau