"The 12.4km Switchback Held The Whole Race And It Cracked Open At 2.4km" — Pogacar Attacks Off Almeida's Wheel To Win Stage 4 Anzere By 22 Seconds, Lipowitz Second, GC Lead Out To 41 Seconds With Sunday's Lausanne TT The Last Variable
Saturday evening Anzere. Stage 4 of the 2026 Tour de Romandie finished exactly the way the morning's UAE template had drawn it. The 12.4km switchback to the line was the only piece of road on the stage that mattered, and the only question on the start ramp at Saint-Maurice was at what point on the climb Tadej Pogacar would let the elastic go. The answer: 2.4km from the line, off the wheel of Joao Almeida, on the steepest gradient of the closing 600 metres. He took 22 seconds at the line on Florian Lipowitz, lifted his arms in the world champion's jersey, and pushed the GC lead out to 41 seconds with only the 17.6km Lausanne time trial standing between him and a fourth Romandie overall.
The race rolled out of Saint-Maurice at 13:15 in 17C and a four-knot south-westerly tail. The morning break was given the room UAE and Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe had agreed in the briefing room: a six-rider move, six minutes at the foot of the Croix de la Croux, two minutes by the time the road tilted up the second cat. one. Guillaume Martin went up the road for Cofidis as authorised in their morning brief, took the mountains points he needed at the day's two cat. one summits, and came back to the bunch on the descent into the valley before Anzere.
UAE's chase template did the rest of the day's heavy lifting. Marc Soler set the tempo on the cat. two before Anzere. Pavel Sivakov took the foot of the climb and held a wattage that shelled the chase down from 24 riders to 11 inside three kilometres. Almeida came over the top with 4km to go and rode for thirty seconds at a pace that put Lenny Martinez in the red and broke the back of the GC group. By the time Almeida pulled off, Pogacar had four riders for company: Lipowitz, Almeida himself in survival mode, Jay Hindley as Red Bull's number two, and Martinez clinging to the back wheel.
The attack came at the only point on the Anzere switchback where the gradient breaks 11 percent. Lipowitz reacted but never closed the bike length, and once the gap was open the German was riding for second. Pogacar took the stage in 4h 02' 18", Lipowitz at +0:22, Hindley at +0:35 in third, Martinez at +0:38 in fourth and Almeida at +0:41 in fifth after his enormous shift on the front. The bunch came in three minutes back, with the morning break long absorbed.
"The team had it set up perfectly," Pogacar told the host broadcaster at the line. "Marc, Pavel, Joao — they emptied themselves. The job was to wait until the steepest part and not waste a watt. The legs were good. We will see what tomorrow brings on the time trial." It is the world champion's third stage win of the week and his seventh of the eight race-days he has completed in 2026, an attrition rate against the WorldTour peloton that has not been seen at this point of the season since the Merckx era of the early 1970s.
The GC reads Pogacar 14h 18' 05", Lipowitz at +0:41, Hindley at +1:14, Martinez at +1:22, Cian Uijtdebroeks at +1:48 and Almeida at +1:52 going into Sunday's 17.6km Lausanne TT. The course is rolling rather than flat, with two cat. four climbs and a technical descent into the lakefront finish. Lipowitz needs 18 to 22 seconds on Pogacar to threaten the overall — a margin he has matched against the world champion exactly once in his career, on the Madrid TT at last year's Vuelta. The market priced it at 4/9 this morning that Pogacar adds the Lausanne stage and exits Sunday with three of the five road days won and the prologue silver.
For Lipowitz, second on Stage 4 was the cleanest demonstration of the Red Bull GC ceiling against the Pogacar-UAE template the German has produced this year. The 22-second loss to Pogacar on the Anzere ramp is the smallest gap any rider has held to the world champion on a summit finish since the Vingegaard-Pogacar duels of the 2024 Tour, and the time gap to Hindley behind him — 13 seconds at the line, more than the rider-on-rider deficit between Lipowitz and Pogacar — settled the internal Red Bull leadership question before Sunday.
The Mollendruz-to-Anzere bookend that defined this week of racing has now sent the Romandie into its closing 24 hours with the answers settled. Pogacar leaves Switzerland for the Giro d'Italia recon block as the rider Jonas Vingegaard will measure himself against in 2026, and Lipowitz returns to Red Bull's Bulgaria Grande Partenza camp as the only GC rider this spring to have lost a summit-finish stage to UAE inside the 25-second margin. The Lausanne TT decides whether that gap holds, narrows, or finally widens.