Söderqvist Drops Benito On The Final Pécs Wall To Take The Tour de Hongrie Queen Stage And The Overall Lead — Breakthrough Win For The Lidl-Trek U23 World Champion On The Closing Pre-Mátraszentimre Ledger
Saturday evening Pécs. The 2026 Tour de Hongrie has its first stage-race breakthrough. Jakob Söderqvist, the twenty-two-year-old reigning under-23 world champion and one of the most-watched climbers of the new wave at Lidl-Trek, has won the queen stage of the 47th-edition Hungarian national tour by dropping his last breakaway companion on the final wall of the Pécs finishing circuit. The bonus seconds carry him into the maglia giallorossa with twenty-four hours to spare before the closing Mátraszentimre summit-finish reference, on what is now the cleanest single-rider pre-final-day Hungarian lead the post-2018 ProSeries era has produced.
The Stage 4 parcours was always going to deliver. After three opening days of sprint-and-puncheur work across the Great Hungarian Plain and the south-Trans-Danubian transition, Saturday's 124.3-kilometre run from Mohács to Pécs — shortened from the original 147 kilometres after the jury cancelled the final local lap on safety grounds — compressed the climbing onto the five-kilometre Pécs ascent. Three ascents of that climb, the final two on the closing circuit, with the line drawn 2.2 kilometres from the foot of a road that averages 9% across that decisive opening section and ramps to 16% at its steepest.
The eight-rider breakaway formed inside the first thirty kilometres of racing and contained the cream of the closing-week opportunists: Söderqvist, Polti VisitMalta's Adrián Benito, Lidl-Trek's Samuele Zoccarato on the MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort license, and five others. By the time the closing circuit opened, only Benito and Söderqvist remained at the front; the chase, led by Jayco-AlUla's Luke Plapp and Decathlon CMA CGM's Benoît Cosnefroy, never closed inside one minute.
On the closing kilometre, with the road tilting through its steepest pitches, the Swede simply rode away from Benito. The Polti rider, who had matched Söderqvist's accelerations on the two earlier ascents, cracked the moment the gradient hit 12%; the gap was eight seconds with 600 metres remaining, fifteen at the line. The closing dash for third was led home by Plapp, who edged William Lecerf Junior and Cosnefroy across the steepest section of the climb in a small group thirty-two seconds back.
"I'd been waiting for the right day," Söderqvist said from the podium. "The team gave me total freedom in the break, and on a climb like that you only get one chance. I knew if I could match him on the second ascent I'd have something left for the third." It is the most significant result of his career to date, the first WorldTour-licensed rider to win a Tour de Hongrie queen stage since Tao Geoghegan Hart's 2017 Vác-Kékestető victory, and a clean confirmation of the Lidl-Trek youth pipeline that brought him from Sweden via the Continental Trek-Segafredo development squad.
Tim Merlier, who had ripped the leader's jersey off Olav Kooij in Szekszárd on Friday, finished safely in the autobus on a day his Soudal Quick-Step squad had targeted purely as a defensive ride. The Belgian sprinter sits 1:14 down on Söderqvist heading into the closing day. The final Stage 5 Vác-Mátraszentimre Mátra-massif queen-summit reference on Sunday will close the race; with Söderqvist now installed as the closing GC favourite and Plapp four seconds down after picking up his bonus seconds for third, the cleanest single-card pre-summit reading the Hungarian national tour has produced compresses onto a one-on-one Lidl-Trek-versus-Jayco-AlUla contest across the Mátra massif.