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Reigning champion Tadej Pogacar regained the race lead as he won stage seven of the Tour de France.<\/b><\/p>\n
Mathieu van der Poel reclaimed the yellow jersey from Pogacar by one second after a gruelling day for the Dutch rider on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Stage seven had the same finish as in 2021, when Van der Poel claimed his first stage win<\/a> on the iconic Mur-de-Bretagne climb.<\/p>\n But he was unable to challenge Pogacar on Friday as the three-time winner edged out Jonas Vingegaard in a sprint for the line, with British rider Oscar Onley<\/a> completing the podium.<\/p>\n The 22-year-old Scot is racing in his second Tour with Picnic PostNL and climbed up to seventh on the general classification standings, with Van der Poel slipping to fifth.<\/p>\n “Me and Mathieu both know this finish very well,” said Pogacar.<\/p>\n “We both wanted to win on this iconic climb but I think maybe yesterday he left too much on the road so we couldn’t have a rematch.”<\/a><\/p>\n Geraint Thomas rolled back the years as the 2018 race winner spent most of the day in a five-man breakaway but the Welshman was caught by the peloton on the first of three categorised climbs in the final 18km.<\/p>\n The 39-year-old is riding in the Tour for the 14th and final time before retiring and helped establish a gap about 55km into the 197km route from Saint-Malo to Mur-de-Bretagne.<\/p>\n That lead never reached more than one minute 40 seconds, so a repeat of Ben Healy’s breakaway win on stage six<\/a> looked unlikely even before the hilly finale.<\/p>\n Ewen Costiou was the last breakaway rider to be caught, just after the second climb, and as the general classification contenders prepared for the final ascent, a nine-man crash brought down Pogacar’s UAE Emirates-XRG team-mate Joao Almeida.<\/p>\n The Slovenian’s other team-mates led him up to the finish while Almeida, who was seventh in the overall standings, came in 10 minutes after Pogacar and Jack Haig was forced to abandon.<\/p>\n