The reigning Giro d'Italia champion Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike) soared to the third Tour de France stage win of his career - and first in six years - with victory atop the Puy de Sancy on Bastille Day as Ireland's Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) took over the race lead from Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG).

In the battle of the “shadow leaders” at this Tour de France, Visma | Lease a Bike landed an important blow on Friday in Mur-de-Bretagne – although perhaps not exactly in the way they had hoped. While Joao Almeida (UAE) crashed hard and lost ten minutes,

Pogacar and Van der Poel have exactly the same overall time of 16 hours, 46 minutes after four stages, and count one stage win each, but Van der Poel kept the yellow jersey because of better finishing positions in the other two stages.

Tadej Pogacar may be concentrating intensely on winning his fourth Tour de France, but in the middle of Saturday's stage eight he was just as focused on how his partner Urska Zigart was performing in the Giro d'Italia Women.

Almost everyone thought that Tadej Pogacar would go into the rest day wearing the yellow jersey. After nine days of tough racing, that is not the case, but the world champion can indeed speak of a kind of pole position in the GC.