Gallery | Team | Tour de France • July 29, 2025
“My day was great” – Inside UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s Tour de France celebrations
As Tadej Pogačar and his teammates celebrate a fourth Tour de France success, we take you inside UAE Team Emirates-XRG on the Champs-Élysées in Paris
Raising his finger to the sky, Tadej Pogačar arrived at the finish line in Paris under dark, stormy clouds on Sunday afternoon.
Pathetic fallacy, it was not. Though the Slovenian had been unable to land one final stage win in the Yellow Jersey, his commanding victory at the 2025 Tour de France was confirmed. A fourth title was his.
For Pogačar, for the race, the moment was altogether different from usual.
Rather than pitting the world’s best sprinters against one another and allowing the champion-elect to roll over the line alongside his teammates, the Tour celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Champs-Élysées by taking the peloton up three ascents of the nearby Montmarte climb.
Despite a torrential downpour causing the GC times to be neutralised, the decision proved an inspired one. Pogačar, clad in his Yellow Jersey, went on the attack, and in Visma-Lease a Bike’s Wout van Aert, he found a more than worthy opponent for the day’s honours.
Forced to settle for fourth across the line, Pogačar was crowned the Tour de France winner in Paris, but he was not arm in arm with his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammates as is normally the case. No, instead, a finger towards the sky and a smile marked his arrival at the finish. The true celebrations would have to wait, if only for a few minutes.
Join us on the Champs-Élysées as we take you inside the moments that Pogačar’s teammates arrived, and the Emirati squad celebrated its fourth Tour de France title in six years.
In these precious ten or so minutes, the world looked on, but for Tadej, Tim, Nils, Pavel, Jhonatan, Marc and Adam, the celebrations were theirs.
The crowd of photographers parts, and just like Moses making his way across the Red Sea, Adam Yates shuffles his way through a throng of onlookers to greet his teammate. With both men sporting smiles at least a mile wide, Yates and Tadej Pogačar embrace. Congratulations are exchanged, and from here until the podium ceremony, this small patch of cobblestones on the Champs-Élysées forms the centre of the cycling universe.
More at home away from the limelight, it doesn’t take long for Yates to begin his retreat, wary of the mass of people who have quickly surrounded this year’s Tour de France champion.
“I’ll get out the way,” he says.
“No, no, it is ok. Adam, it is like this: we just wait. We wait for five more minutes or something, it’s all good.”
Now a four-time Tour winner, Pogačar is well-versed in the melee that follows the final stage. He assures Yates that they can wait for the rest of their teammates to cross the line before the circus truly leaves town.
As the photographers squeeze from all sides, each hoping to snatch the perfect shot of the world champion, Pogačar is more interested in hearing what his teammate made of the final stage.
“How was your day, Adam?”
Never far from view, Yoseba Elguezabal shows his face. With each push and each shove from the prying lenses that surround Pogačar, the bearded UAE Team Emirates-XRG masseur only seems to grow in stature. He knows how to position himself so that his riders are able to enjoy this moment without interruption.
Elguezabal is to the post-race scrum as Tim Wellens is to the Yellow Jersey out on the roads: protector-in-chief.
The hubbub only continues as the day’s finishers cross the line.
Cameras flash towards Geraint Thomas, on his last Tour outing, and Jonas Vingegaard, a podium-finisher for five years on the bounce, before returning to the side of Pogačar and his partner Urška Žigart. Nobody knows better than Zigart what sacrifices have had to be made for Pogačar to achieve another Tour de France title.
Next to cross the line, some 10 minutes after the stage winner Wout van Aert, Nils Politt and Wellens are hand in hand.
For the second year in a row, the ever-reliable rouleurs have chaperoned Pogačar to a resounding Tour triumph. The celebrations that follow will ring long into the Parisian night.
90 seconds later, Pavel Sivakov, Marc Soler and Jhonatan Narváez each cross the line in a 20-man bunch. Narváez’s final pedal strokes of his very first Tour de France are lowkey, but his entrance to the group surrounding this year’s champion will be anything but.
The day’s battle stories are shared between Pogačar, Politt and Wellens – “that was a close call, ah,” recalls the champion – before Sivakov and Soler join the party.
For Sivakov, the moment is extra sweet. Born and bred a proud Frenchman with a love for this race above all else, the 28-year-old stands across from his teammate, the Yellow Jersey. It is the second time in his career that Sivakov has helped Pogačar win the Tour de France, but this is their first chance to celebrate on the famous Champs-Élysées.
Where last year’s finale in Nice must have felt a little atypical, the Arc de Triomphe beckons over the shoulder of Pogačar to remind the Tour de France of its true home.
With four slaps on the back, Sivakov embraces his teammate. This year’s race has at times been a battle for the Frenchman, who was struck by illness, but the fight was all worth it for this moment.
Attention quickly turns to the missing man.
“Where is your friend?” Pogačar asks of Soler.
The man from Catalunya immediately knows that his only fellow Spanish-speaking teammate is the subject of enquiry. He waves an arm over to the right, somewhere beyond the mass of people who surround the reunion.
With a few shrugs of the shoulders, nobody is quite sure where the missing man is.
It is one of the rare moments in this Tour de France that Jhonatan Narváez, the devastating lead-out man for Pogačar’s all-conquering attacks, has not been front and centre.
“Where is Jhony? Where is Jhony?”
The Ecuadorian could be forgiven for not knowing the protocol. Not only is he a Tour de France debutant, but the 28-year-old is the only rider present (or not, in this case) who was not part of the UAE Team Emirates squad that won the 2024 Tour de France.
After his winter transfer from Ineos Grenadiers, Narváez was pencilled in for his Tour de France bow, and with a series of career-best displays in the mountains, he ultimately proved a revelation.
New to the Tour, new to Paris, and new to the celebrations that follow the Yellow Jersey on the Champs-Élysées, a wide-eyed Narváez shows his face a few minutes later.
“Jhony! Jhony! Jhony!”
The Ecuadorian is welcomed with a cheer from all his teammates and a rub of the head from Sivakov. Last year, it was the Frenchman who was experiencing winning the Tour de France as a teammate for the very first time. Now, the baton has been passed.
“Number one, Jhony! Number one! Let’s take a photo, ah”
And so, with the Arc de Triomphe looming large, the seven remaining UAE Team Emirates-XRG riders unite arm in arm on the cobbled streets of Paris.
Cheers ring out as the victors of the Tour de France celebrate their achievement, but it is Nils Politt who captures best the spirit that has led them to this crowning moment.
As the photographers prepare to lay down their equipment and head to the podium area, it is the German who breaks the relative calm.
“UAE! UAE! UAE!”
His teammates soon join in.
“UAE! UAE! UAE!”
The chants echo across the Champs-Élysées and, with the help of live TV broadcasters, across the world.
There’s an appreciation for what they have achieved not just as a group of seven, not even as a group of eight – with the absence of João Almeida keenly felt – but as a team. The celebrations are on behalf of the whole UAE Team Emirates-XRG apparatus that has just claimed another Tour de France title.
Eight masseurs, seven mechanics, three physios, three sports directors, the list goes on. All in all, 34 staff members each made their contribution on the ground in France, and that is not to mention the months of hard work which have all built up to this moment.
As he and his teammates crossed the line in Paris, Pogačar had delivered on the team’s best-laid plans and more.
In each embrace after the line, in each word of congratulations, and in each call of “UAE” as they stood arm in arm, UAE Team Emirates-XRG celebrated a job well done.
The podium ceremony and countless interviews were still to come for Pogačar on Sunday evening, but in that moment, he and his teammates were eternal. His place, and that of UAE Team Emirates-XRG, had been secured in history as four-time Tour de France champions.
“How was your day, Adam?”
That was the question from Pogačar. As the Brit smiled back at the Yellow Jersey, there could only ever be one answer.
“My day was great.”
