Tour de France – Stage 21 – A Final Battle to the Champs-Élysées

After the traditional parade along the cobblestones, attacks came thick and fast. Benjamin Thomas was one of the first to go on the offensive. As the peloton made its way up and down the Montmartre hill, the pace picked up even more, and the attacks came one after another, making for a particularly spectacular race.
Despite numerous attempts by the peloton to catch up, Mathieu Van der Poel managed to hold on until the very end to win solo on the Champs-Élysées. Behind him, the peloton’s sprint allowed Milan Fretin to secure an impressive 9th place, rewarding the team’s collective effort on this final day.
Thus ends the 2026 Tour de France, marked by Cofidis’ relentless offensive. Day after day, the team’s riders distinguished themselves at the front of the race, launching numerous breakaways and initiatives. This racing philosophy, true to the team’s DNA, kept the Tour de France exciting right up to its final kilometer on the Champs-Élysées.

Raphaël Jeune, general manager :  "The result is satisfactory since we finished with 8 riders. Only 8 teams in this Tour finished with 8 riders. It’s been a very long time since Cofidis finished with eight riders—five years, I believe. Obviously, we could have set our sights even higher, meaning winning a stage like all the other teams, but we managed five top-10 finishes, including one by Milan Fretin.

I think Cofidis showed a new side of itself with a very solid lead-out. You can see that Milan has what it takes to win because when you finish 4th and 5th in a stage, you’re really not far from winning. In the Nevers stage, where he finished 4th after moving a little too early, I think he could have made the podium. And then in Chalon, where he finished 5th—there he went for it a little too early. But that’s part of the learning process. It’s his first Tour de France. So, coming away with five top-10 finishes, I think the results are satisfactory.

To take a break from the sprints, there was also some action in the breakaways. We saw that last Thursday, Hugo Page was part of the big breakaway. He finished 12th—again, a slight lack of experience competing at this level for the win, perhaps a bit too much wasted effort. And I think that without that wasted effort, he could have made the top 10. Then there was Ion Izagirre, who was everywhere in the semi-mountainous and even mountainous stages. It was his last Tour de France, and he was as motivated as a junior rider.

Only 9 out of 23 teams have won stages at the Tour de France. Among those 9 teams, the riders are almost always ranked among the top 20 in the world.  So it’s very difficult—and getting harder and harder—to win at the Tour. But we’re building our project step by step. We showed, once again, that in the sprint, we were right up there with Milan, with a real lead-out train. So we’re going to work even harder to come back even stronger.

I have no regrets about this year’s race. It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen a French team with a lead-out as cohesive as Cofidis’s. We saw it again on this final stage on the Champs-Élysées. With 500 meters to go, we still had three Cofidis riders pulling the peloton.  I don’t know if we’ve ever seen anything like this in the history of Team Cofidis. I think that in the early sprints at the start of the Tour, no one expected us to be at that level when it came to taking the lead in the sprints.

We need to work on that and on other areas. The climbers, for example. And the puncheurs, too. Ion is retiring at the end of the year, so these are issues we’re tackling right now."