Tadej Pogacar is about to win his fifth Tour de France, which sounds thrilling until you notice the margin: six minutes and 26 seconds over Remco Evenepoel. Across a three-week race covering thousands of kilometres, that is a landslide — the general-classification equivalent of lapping the field. The 27-year-old will roll into Paris to join Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain as the only men ever to win five, a list of immortals that now has a very much alive intruder on it.

What makes it faintly absurd is that Pogacar sealed cycling immortality by finishing the brutal queen stage in fourth. He didn't need to win the hardest day — 170.9km, three hors-categorie climbs, 5,450 metres of climbing, a second summit finish at Alpe d'Huez — because he'd already broken everyone weeks ago. He spent the day as a domestique, shepherding teammate Isaac del Toro onto the podium. When the best rider alive can afford to work for someone else on the queen stage, the suspense left the building a long time ago.

The actual drama went to the people not winning the Tour. Ecuador's Richard Carapaz took the stage; American Sepp Kuss, who looked set for a redemptive solo victory, crashed twice in the closing kilometres and watched it evaporate. That's bike racing's cruel little arrangement: the man who wins overall does it by attrition and arithmetic, while the genuine heartbreak and glory happen to everyone scrapping behind him.

Even the traditional Paris procession has been rewritten by reality. Organisers slashed Sunday's final stage from 133km to 89km after emergency services were pulled away to fight devastating wildfires in the country's south-west — a quiet reminder that the sport's pageantry rolls across a continent increasingly on fire. A new section over Montmartre has been added to let the breakaway riders steal a spotlight the sprinters usually own.

By convention nobody attacks the yellow jersey on the final day, so barring catastrophe Pogacar has already won. Five Tours, one of the great margins in the race's history, and a coronation stage trimmed to make room for a climate emergency. The record books will remember the number. They rarely record how little of it was ever actually in doubt.