Cruel End to the Fairy Tale: Træen Loses Yellow on the Tourmalet, Then Crashes on the Descent
Cycling rarely lets its fairy tales end gently. Torstein Træen began stage 6 of the Tour de France in the yellow jersey he had carried with such pride since Foix, holding almost eight minutes over the race favourites. He ended it battered, bloodied and more than fourteen minutes down, his time atop the sport's greatest race stripped away by the Col du Tourmalet and then punished further by the mountain's descent.
The Uno-X Mobility rider had defended his lead superbly through the first Pyrenean skirmishes, but the Tourmalet at full UAE pace was a different examination altogether. Træen cracked with around ten kilometres of the climb remaining, sliding backwards through the groups as Tadej Pogačar disappeared up the road. By the summit he was 7:38 down, and the jersey was already gone in all but name.
Then it got worse. On the descent towards Gavarnie-Gèdre, Træen touched the rear wheel of a teammate and crashed heavily on a bend. Medical staff attended to him at the roadside before he was able to remount, and the Norwegian showed real courage simply in finishing the stage — but the images of the man in yellow picking himself off the tarmac were among the most painful of this Tour. He eventually crossed the line over fourteen minutes behind Pogačar, his GC challenge over.
Uno-X can still leave this Tour proud. Træen's three days in yellow — earned from the stage 4 breakaway and defended with intelligence through Pau — represent the biggest moment in the Norwegian team's history, and the scenes of Scandinavian fans on the roadside all week have been one of the stories of the race. The team will now switch focus to stage hunting, with Træen himself vowing to recover from his injuries and enjoy the rest of the Tour with freedom.
He was not the only casualty of a brutal day. Cian Uijtdebroeks, making his Tour debut for Movistar, abandoned after a wretched afternoon in which illness, a shoe problem on the Col d'Aspin and UAE's relentless tempo conspired against him — a sad end to a Grand Départ he had targeted all season. Sprinters Arvid de Kleijn and Bert Van Lerberghe also climbed off in the heat, thinning a fast-man field already reduced by earlier crashes.
The stage's winners and losers could hardly be more starkly divided. Pogačar leads the Tour by 2:42 from Jonas Vingegaard; Træen, who woke up in yellow, is no longer part of the GC conversation at all. But if the Tour teaches anything, it is that the race gives as ruthlessly as it takes — and for three days in July, a 30-year-old Norwegian who once beat cancer led the greatest bike race on earth. Nobody can take that away.