Tadej Pogačar knows that his season has been, by his own admission, “perfect.” Since things kicked off in the UAE Tour back in February, the world champion has rarely stepped away from the podium, destroying his competition on every type of terrain he turns his attention to. The white roads of Strade Bianche? Completed it. The cobbles of Flanders? Tick. The punchy climbs of Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège? Yep. Key Tour de France warm-up race, the Critérium du Dauphiné? Won by over a minute. Life is pretty good if you’re Tadej Pogačar on a bike right now.
“Coming here to the Tour de France as one of the favourites is an honour and I am pleased,” the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider stated just two days before this year’s Grand Départ in Lille. “I hope I can live up to expectations.”
The reality is, no one expects anything less than victory from Pogačar at this year’s Tour. With a star-studded support team around him and the type of form he has exhibited so far this season, there is no reason not to. He may have showed a slight chink in the armour with an imperfect time trial at the Dauphiné by his standards, finishing in fourth place on the stage, but the Slovenian rider immediately corrected himself by winning on sixth and seventh days of the race, dropping Jonas Vingegaard, his long-time rival, convincingly when the road kicked up. Is this what we have to expect from the next three weeks? An unflappable, dominant Pogačar with very few people to challenge him? Or is there scope for Visma-Lease a Bike to throw a spanner in the cleanly-oiled UAE machine?
“On long climbs Jonas is the best climber in the world at the moment and has been for the last few years,” Pogačar stated. “He can also do great time trials, sometimes better than me. We are both there and we will have to see during this Tour who is better in which places.”
The scores so far are three to two when it comes to Pogačar and Vingegaard’s yellow jersey triumphs. The latter has a maillot jaune from 2022 and 2023 in his wardrobe, with the former taking Tour victories in 2020, 2021 and 2024. It has been a rivalry that will go down to the ages between two riders who are, paradoxically, so closely matched and starkly different at the same time. One attacks on instinct and with panache, the other favours a methodic, planned assassination of a long mountain – this is what makes the pair so intriguing to watch during three-week…