The 2025 Tour de France has more than delivered on drama in its opening week, from unexpected victors to Ben Healy staging an audacious raid to steal the yellow jersey off defending champion Tadej Pogacar’s shoulders.
Wednesday’s stage 11 featured a feelgood story as Jonas Abrahamsen, only four weeks on from breaking his collarbone at the Baloise Belgium Tour, jumped into the breakaway from kilometre zero and stayed away until the finish, winning a tight two-up sprint against breakaway companion and Tour debutant Mauro Schmid.
It was a maiden grand tour win for the intrepid breakaway specialist – best known for his long stint in the king of the mountains jersey last year – a first Tour de France win for Norway since Alexander Kristoff won stage 1 of the 2020 edition, and a first for his team Uno X-Mobility, who were overcome with emotion as they celebrated.
Abrahamsen and Schmid were part of a five-man group including British rider Fred Wright, who ultimately finished seventh, and who worked well together to hold off another quintet of chasers including Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert. Van der Poel attacked on the final climb of the punchy 157km stage and dropped his companions, but despite his best efforts could not bridge across to the pair of survivors out front, who finished seven seconds ahead of the Dutchman.
“I broke my collarbone four weeks ago in [the Baloise] Belgium Tour, I was crying because I thought I wasn’t riding the Tour de France,” Abrahamsen said at the finish, recalling how he got onto his turbo trainer at home the day after in a desperate bid to get back to fitness in time to make the squad.
“Every day I did everything I could to come back. To win a stage at the Tour de France is amazing. It was so difficult to pass [Schmid] but I was thinking, ‘I have to win the stage’.”
Stage 11 was also notable for a late crash by defending champion Tadej Pogacar, who overlapped wheels with Tobias Halland Johannessen and hit the deck with 4km to go. The Slovene was up and running quickly again as a neutral service mechanic helped fix his chain, but faced a race to get back onto the yellow jersey group until they sportingly knocked off the pace to allow him to get back on.
“I’m quite OK. I’m a bit beaten up, but we’ve been through worse days,” Pogacar said afterwards. “Really big respect to everybody in front. Obviously the race was more or less over back there, but still, they could take time – maybe not take too much time – but I would need to go really deep to come back like this.”
But after this opening week and a bit of skirmishing between the big guns, with Monday’s stage 10 a test run for Visma-Lease a Bike’s strategy of trying to isolate Pogacar as much as possible, the real racing kicks off today.
That’s because we finally reach the mountains: the riders are into the Pyrenees, with today’s route spanning 180km from Auch to Hautacam, with 3,850m of elevation gain along the way.
Four categorised climbs are on the menu: the cat-four Cote de Labatmale is a bit of a gentle warm-up, before back-to-back ascents of the cat-one Col du Soulor (11.8km at an average of 7.3%) and the cat-two Col des Borderes (3.1km at an average 7.7%), with just a short descent breaking the two up.
There’s then a long, broken-up descent off the Borderes before the gradient rises again up to Hautacam: 13.5km at an average of 7.8%, a far cry from the short, sharp climbs in Normandy and Brittany that littered the first week’s action.
The formidable Hautacam is the first hors-categorie climb of the race and it’s a summit finish to boot, with plenty of points on offer in the King of the Mountains competition but more importantly, it may as well be bait for the marauding Pogacar to stamp his authority on the race, wrestle back the yellow jersey, and add to his already impressive haul of 19 Tour stage wins and counting.
That’s assuming he won’t be feeling the aftereffects of his stage 11 crash, and if Jonas Vingegaard doesn’t get the better of him on the Pyrenean slopes, as he has done before.
Hautacam was where his team, then known as Jumbo-Visma, turned the screw on his Slovenian rival in 2022, with the Dane taking the stage victory at the top en route to winning the first of his two titles. With that rich recent history in mind, and plenty of needle between the two teams so far this race, today’s stage should be an absolute cracker.
Route map and profile
Start time
Stage 12 begins with the neutralised start at 1.10pm local time (12.10pm BST), with an expected finish time at 5.30pm local time (4.30pm BST).
Prediction
This is the first mountain battle of this year’s Tour and it feels impossible that the general classification contenders will allow a breakaway to take the honours. Everything we’ve seen in this Tour so far points towards Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar being in a league of their own whenever the gradient kicks uphill.
Visma-Lease a Bike will no doubt pile the pressure on Pogacar and his depleted team (key mountain lieutenant Joao Almeida abandoned the race on stage 10 after suffering a broken rib in a crash earlier in the week), especially after the Slovenian himself crashed late on stage 11 and may be feeling a little battered and bruised.
But even with that said, it’s hard to look beyond the best rider in the world, Tadej Pogacar, for the victory today: exorcising his ghosts from 2022 and wrestling the psychological momentum back from his rival’s team.
