Pogačar, Pogačar and Pogačar
The reason is simple: He is simply the best. The best rider of his generation or of all time, he dominates the sport like a large rock tossed into a small net. In sports, the best athlete or team almost always wins. True, he has lost the Tour twice to Jonas Vingegaard (Visma–Lease a Bike), but I think there were mitigating circumstances.
In 2022, he was whipsawed by Vingegaard and then his Visma teammate, Primož Roglič, on the Col du Granon, and had no teammates with him to counter the repeated attacks. He ended up finishing 2:51 behind Vingegaard in the stage and 2:43 in the final GC. Since then, the team has gone to great lengths to surround Pogačar with the strongest support riders in the sport, with João Almeida now widely considered to be the best domestique in the world (a domestique who has won three stage races this year!) and even a contender for a top five GC finish in the Tour.
Pogačar lost the 2023 Tour because he sustained a broken wrist in a crash in the Liège-Bastogne-Liège and lost a lot of training time in the runup to the Tour. As a result, he lost time to Vingegaard in the stage 16 ITT and then cracked badly on the climb to the finish on the Col de la Loze, crossing the line 5:45 behind the Dane. But Pogačar is at the top of his game at the moment, better than ever, in fact, and trounced Vingegaard in the recent Critérium du Dauphiné, which the Slovenian won without raising a sweat.
There’s no reason to waste any more words on it. There’s only one thing that bothers me: Whenever I’m this sure of something, it turns out to be wrong.
The also-rans: Vingo and Remco
Vingegaard should come in second, though I don’t think he has yet fully recovered from the injuries and long convalescence of his crash in last year’s Itzulia Basque Country. Yes, it’s been more than a year, but the body requires a long time to get back to top fitness after sustaining severe injuries. And he also crashed in Paris-Nice, suffering a concussion and losing valuable racing and training time.
But Visma has the usual strong team of support riders, headed by this year’s Giro d’Italia winner Simon Yates and the young American Matteo Jorgenson. Look for Vingegaard to start slowly, get stronger in weeks two and three – and lose the race by 5 to 8 minutes. But Yates is a wild card in this game of road poker, and he and Jorgenson may be able to drag their leader back into contention after Pogačar’s inevitable explosive breakaways on the big climbs. But the yellow jersey always comes down to a man-to-man battle, and Pogačar is too strong for Vingegaard.
What I have said about crashes also applies to Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step), who is still working his way back to best form after a bad training crash in December. He remains the best ITT rider in the world, but he is not yet strong enough to win the Tour or compete with Pogačar or Vingegaard on the big climbs. He easily won the Belgian National Time Trial Championship on June 27, but surprisingly lost the road race, by 38 seconds, to Pogačar teammate and support rider Tim Wellens.
He sounded uncharacteristically cautious at the team’s final pre-Tour press conference presentation, where he said, “I had a pretty horrible winter, so we’ll see how it goes over the next three weeks. A lack of good winter training is pretty annoying, so I have to take it day by day and accept the way the Tour goes. We’ll try to do the same as last year, win a stage, preferably two, and then go for the podium again. I think that’s a healthy and realistic ambition.”
Roglič and the others
I’m not convinced that Evenepoel is where he needs to be to ride a strong Tour de France. The question is if he will be on the podium in Paris on July 27 or if it will be Primož Roglič (Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe), who, at age 35, is still hunting for that elusive Tour de France title. The five-time Grand Tour winner was miles from his best in this year’s Giro, finally crashing out on stage 16 while already out of GC contention. He hasn’t raced since then. The team says that a podium is the goal, but I’m sure that Roglič has his eyes on the bigger prize.
But for that, or even for a podium place, he has to stay on his bike. He crashed out last year in his first Tour ride for his new team, and he crashed out of the Giro this year, which makes me wonder if age is affecting his bike-handling skills. On the other hand, he has a very good support team, with the rising star Florian Lipowitz and the veteran Aleksandr Vlasov to help him up the mountains, and he is an excellent climber and time trial rider. If he manages to avoid crashing – and that’s a big if – I think he’ll finish on the podium.
Other top 5 contenders include Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek), Felix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), as well as Almeida, Jorgenson and Lipowitz, three support riders who often finish near their leaders on the climbs. The first week or 10 days of this Tour will no doubt reduce the number of realistic GC contenders and go a long way in determining how the decisive third week will be raced. It should be a lot of fun.
