Olav Kooij emerged out of the heat haze in the Place de Verdun to win stage five of the Tour de France in Pau. In the first sprint finish in the 2026 Tour, Kooij, teammate to Paul Seixas at Decathlon CMA CGM, won with ease from Max Kanter of XDA Astana.

Yet Kooij, who took three stages in the Tour of Britain last year, almost did not start the Tour because of a lingering illness. “I was tired for the first two months of the year,” he said. “There were moments when I had no idea how long it would take.

“We had made a lot of plans and a lot of the time we had to adjust them. Step by step, I got more confidence that I’d be ready for the Tour, but for sure it was a race against the clock.”

In one of the few sprint stages in the race this year, the fight for positioning was intense, with crashes in the final kilometres delaying the race leader, Torstein Træen. Despite his mishap, there was no change to the Norwegian rider’s overall lead.

“We went through a corner and suddenly I was on the ground,” he said. “Luckily the Visma train [of Jonas Vingegaard] was going fast and we got back to the group.”

Despite that fright Træen – who was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2022 but returned to action after successful surgery – said he had enjoyed his first day in yellow. “When you get cancer you don’t know what will happen, so I’m happy to be back at a good level and leading the biggest race in the world.”

On another long, hot afternoon, characterised by ice vests, ice socks and plenty of water-cooled helmets, the Lotto-Intermarché rider Baptiste Veistroffer was the sole aggressor. It was a baptism of fire for the Tour debutant, with the Breton ploughing a solitary furrow over the hot asphalt for almost 140km.

His lone break came to an end soon after he had hauled himself over the day’s only climb, the Côte de Baleix, and the peloton swallowed him up with 14km to race.

As for Remco Evenepoel, Thursday’s stage to Gavarnie-Gèdre marks a return to the Tourmalet, the long steep climb that was the scene of his humiliating abandonment from the Tour in 2025.

The double Olympic gold medallist has made a solid start this year but has not yet been discussed in the same breathless terms as Seixas or UAE Team Emirates XRG’s Isaac del Toro. Yet as a former third‑place finisher and a past winner of the Vuelta a España, he remains a strong contender for a podium place in Paris.

Now 26, Evenepoel, master of the punchy soundbite, leads the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team alongside the quietly spoken German Florian Lipowitz, who finished third overall in 2025. To date, it is a big‑money collaboration that has failed to set the sport on fire. Questions over whether he and Lipowitz can work together have brought a prickly response from the often outspoken Evenepoel.

“I know where you want to go,” he said. “You want to hear me say I want to be on the podium and then 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.”

Nonetheless, even his team do not seem clear. “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,” their team manager, Ralph Denk, said before adding: “They will have to fight it out between themselves on the road.”

Any fighting it out looks to be on hold, at least for now. The expectation is that, unless Tadej Pogacar is plotting another of his solo attacks, the favourites will be happy to keep their powder dry on the climb of Tourmalet.

Træen, however, was not so sure. “Tadej is Tadej,” he said with a shrug. “We have to see how fast they are going. If he goes full gas on the Tourmalet, then maybe I will be behind. Then you don’t know how much you might lose, so we’ll just have to see.”