2026 starts here as Pogacar, Evenepoel and Vingegaard clash at European Championships

Tadej Pogačar’s superiority at the World Championships brooked no argument, but he has the chance to prove the point all over again in the European Championships road race on Sunday. Indeed, Pogačar being Pogačar, he might feel obliged to hammer home the lesson all over again given the nature of the opposition.

Remco Evenepoel never quite resigned himself to Pogačar’s primacy in Rwanda, and he will take another tilt at the windmill here. Jonas Vingegaard might have lost belief in his own ability to challenge Pogačar this season, but this appearance in the Drôme-Ardêche offers a chance to lay down a symbolic marker for next year.

Pogacar’s appetite for 2025 should be sated, with another Tour de France, another rainbow jersey, another Liège-Bastogne-Liège, another Tour of Flanders and another Strade Bianche inscribed on his palmarès. 

But we know by now that the normal rules don’t apply to the Slovenian. The European Championships is a rare race missing from his resumé, of course, but the event might also be the stage for another flex, another opportunity to calcify the doubts in the minds of his biggest rivals. 2026 starts here, in what might prove one of the most intriguing races of 2025.

The elite men’s road race has never quite felt like an A-list fixture since the event was added to the European Championships in 2016, but circumstances have conspired to make this year’s race appointment viewing. 

The logistics of the Rwanda Worlds – and, let’s face it, Pogačar’s inevitable dominance on such a demanding course – dissuaded many star names from making the trip. The European Championships has benefited accordingly, with riders like Mads Pedersen (Denmark) and João Almeida (Portugal) all lining up in France after opting out of the trip to Kigali.

It’s Vingegaard’s presence, however, that has created the biggest stir, given his previous reluctance to line up in championships races. Remarkably, this will be Vingegaard’s first appearance at elite level with the Danish national team. His last outing in their colours came in the under-23 road race at the Innsbruck Worlds in 2018.

Then again, Vingegaard has never been much given to one-day racing of any description. Since his first Tour de France victory in 2022, he has limited himself to just two one-day outings, placing 16th in that year’s Il Lombardia and then abandoning last year’s Clásica San Sebastián.

“I dream of performing well in one-day races. If I haven’t participated in many one-day races in recent years, it’s because I haven’t really discovered how to perform in them yet,” Vingegaard told Wielerflits this week.

This most high-profile European Championships would be quite a place to start, even if it’s hard to shake off the sense that Vingegaard is here almost by happenstance. Kigali, with its 5,000m of climbing, looked like the ideal kind of Worlds course for Vingegaard’s elite international debut, but the Dane reckoned that the expedition wasn’t compatible with riding – and winning – the Vuelta a España.

When he announced on the eve of that Vuelta that he would forgo the Worlds, Vingegaard also confirmed that he would line up at the European Championships, as though seeking to offset the inevitable disappointment in his native Denmark.

Still, Vingegaard would also have reckoned that the recovering from the Vuelta and preparing specifically for the European Championships might give him an edge over Pogačar, Evenepoel and the others lining up with the exertions of Kigali in their legs. 

And while Sunday’s route isn’t as obviously tailored to Vingegaard’s gifts as Kigali, it’s worth noting that he has some previous in this neck of the woods. He knows the key climb of the Val d’Enfer from racing the Faun-Ardèche Classic in 2022 – and the following day, he claimed the lone one-day win of his career at the Drôme Classic. He’s not here just to make up the numbers.

While Vingegaard has been circumspect about his prospects on Sunday, Evenepoel has been rather more forthright about the importance of the European Championships, which he suggested was his biggest goal of the year after the Tour.

It’s certainly been a year of unfinished business for Evenepoel, whose season was delayed by his heavy training crash last December. All the chasing caught up with him in July, when he endured a trying Tour – though even in his distress, he still won the time trial and still lay third overall at the time of his abandon.

By the time his transfer to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe was finalised in August, Evenepoel already had his sights set on championship racing at the end of the season. A crushing display in the individual time trial in Rwanda brought Evenepoel his third straight world title, and it also heightened expectations ahead of the road race. After catching Pogačar in the time trial, Evenepoel was suddenly wondering why he couldn’t beat him in the main event.

A broken saddle on Mont Kigali and a lack of composure aboard his replacement bike, however, would severely hinder Evenepoel just as Pogačar was going about the business of deciding the race. Although Evenepoel impressed over the last hour or so of racing, Pogačar was already in procession mode, and the Belgian ultimately made no inroads into his advantage.

The lingering question was whether Evenepoel’s mechanical travails had denied him a genuine shot at the world title or whether they had ultimately masked the fact that Pogačar was operating on another level. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

No matter, it’s certainly true that Evenepoel’s broken saddle denied us the spectacle of a real head-to-head contest with Pogačar, and so this rematch at the European Championships road race rolls around mercifully quickly.

Unlike Pogačar, Evenepoel took on the time trial at the European Championships to boot, and despite his long, long journey from Rwanda, he showed few signs of fatigue as he scorched to the tile on Wednesday. “A f*cking rocket,” was Filippo Ganna’s succinct appraisal.

Evenepoel will be carrying a sense of frustration and injustice into Sunday’s race. If he can maintain that form, too, then we might just have a real contest on our hands, particularly as the course is open to interpretation in ways that Kigali simply was not.

On the Cycling Podcast, Daniel Friebe compared the unfolding of the Rwanda Worlds to a Gran Fondo, with the strongest rider, Pogačar, simply easing clear while the rest of the field spilled home in ones and twos.

The European Championships, which takes place over just 202km, promises to be less of an endurance test and more of a bike race, with all the tactical considerations that entails. The climbs of the Montée de Costebelle and the Val d’Enfer in the finale offer obvious springboards for the strongest man to power clear, but there is scope for a real slugging match rather than a procession.

Pogacar will rightly expect to be the last man standing, but like the riotous opening stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné in June, Evenepoel and Vingegaard won’t be shy about landing blows.