Jonathan Milan’s green jersey campaign was chaotic and beautiful

Lidl-Trek believed from the beginning that Jonathan Milan could win the green jersey at the Tour de France. They didn’t expect him to win it like this.

Milan crossed Sunday’s finish line in Paris as the Points Classification winner, preventing yellow and polka-dot jersey winner Tadej Pogacar from completing a jersey trifecta. Milan and Lidl-Trek waged a three-week campaign that featured two stage wins and a focused effort to suck up as many intermediate sprint points as possible. The Slovenian rider won four stages and threatened to take the historically sprinter-dominated classification in a particularly chaotic edition of the Grande Boucle, but Lidl-Trek rode a pristine final week to win its second grand tour points classification of 2025.

“[This was a] big goal that we were thinking about from the beginning of the year. Because for me, it was the big goal for all our team,” Milan said Sunday. “I have to say that this is really beautiful for me. I really enjoyed [my teammates]. I really had fun.”

While Lidl-Trek largely bossed the peloton during Mads Pedersen’s Giro d’Italia Ciclamino campaign, this year’s Tour featured high-powered breakaways and manic racing nearly every day, preventing prototypical lead-outs from forming before the Tour’s scant sprint finishes. Milan is maybe the most dangerous man on the planet when launching an attack from a hard-charging bunch, but for both of his two wins, he had to deftly maneuver within a reduced field to cross the line first. 

Milan’s teammates, assembled as a high-powered train to help tow him to the line, often had to reallocate their talents to chasing down breakaways from long range. One of the squad’s most memorable efforts came on Stage 9 when Mathieu van der Poel, among the best one-day riders ever, got dangerously far up the road on what was supposed to be a textbook sprint finish stage and Lidl-Trek, defending Milan in the green jersey, exhausted its lead-out to reel him in. Milan took second on the stage in another hectic sprint.

“[As a] team we are growing,” Milan said. “We have been able to achieve also other goals that we were thinking about at the beginning of the year. So I think this means a lot. This shows how tough we work during the year.”

Quinn Simmons was emblematic of Lidl-Trek’s team effort. Simmons was given the “Super Teammate” award by the Tour de France for his near constant presence at the front of the peloton. The 24-year-old American national champion showcased a world class engine, and took second on a hilly Stage 6 after spending 155 kilometers in the breakaway.

Above all, the theme of Lidl-Trek’s Tour de France was “mitigating chaos.” The squad got off to a rocky start on Stage 1, when it got caught behind crosswinds and fell out of position for the sprint. The team wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Milan’s tall, green frame was almost always at the pointy end of every non-mountain stage, and his teammates crucially kept him ahead of a 1k-to-go crash that took place just off his back wheel before he sprinted to a Stage 17 win.

“It was a really tough fight, I have to say. It was a big goal. As I always said, it was a big dream since the beginning of the year,” Milan said. “I think it’s also a big dream since I started as a pro. So, you know, we achieved a lot today. And I’m just super happy for me, for the work that the team did.”

Milan’s green jersey victory didn’t go exactly as the team drew it up, but that only made it sweeter. This year’s Tour de France was one of the most exciting of recent memory precisely because of its day-to-day unpredictability. But as the stages rolled on, Lidl-Trek got stronger and asserted itself within the chaos. In the end, the team got exactly what it wanted all along: Milan in green, in Paris, beaming.