Pogacar looks untouchable, but the Tour still has three reasons to hope

Alexander Pope wrote that hope springs eternal in the human breast. At the Tour de France, it sometimes has to.

Tadej Pogačar has spent the past two Julys steadily stripping hope from those around him. 

He won six stages of the 2024 Tour and beat Jonas Vingegaard by 6:17. Twelve months later, he collected another four stages and finished 4:24 clear of the same rival. Different routes, different patterns, but broadly the same conclusion: he looked untouchable.

In 2024, the contest ended amid Pogačar’s sequence of victories in the Alps in the third week. In 2025, the decisive blow came earlier, when he took more than two minutes from Vingegaard on Hautacam. The final week was not without attacks, but the yellow jersey never looked truly vulnerable. Pogačar was the strongest, but more importantly, he dictated the terms of the race and forced everyone else to operate within them.

There has been little encouragement for his rivals in 2026 either.

Pogačar has taken 11 victories (and two GC's) from only 16 days of racing, a nominal strike rate of almost 70 percent. His worst result has been twelfth. At the Tour de Suisse, his final preparation race, he won the opening stage with a 72 kilometre attack, edged Mathieu van der Poel in the time trial and then claimed the queen stage and the overall title by 6:32.

The method keeps changing, but the result does not.

He can win from distance, in a reduced sprint, against the clock or on a punchy or summit finish. The old question was where Pogačar might still be vulnerable, whether in the heat or across consecutive high altitude climbs. The more relevant question now is whether vulnerability remains part of his competitive vocabulary at all.

And yet the Tour cannot begin without hope. It simply changes shape according to the rider carrying it.

For Vingegaard, hope lies in the accumulated strain of a Grand Tour. For Seixas, it is bound up with the longing of a cycling nation. For Evenepoel, it rests on the belief that a new environment can produce a new version of an already exceptional rider.

None of those arguments is entirely convincing. That does not make them meaningless.

Jonas Vingegaard is still the only rider in this field who knows precisely what it takes to defeat Pogačar over three weeks. He did it in 2022 and again in 2023, first through collective pressure and then through an individual display of force in the time trial at Combloux.

The difficulty is that those victories already seem to belong to another phase of the rivalry.

Pogačar has won their past two Tour encounters emphatically, while Vingegaard has spent much of the period since his crash at Itzulia Basque Country in 2024 trying to return to the physical and psychological certainty he once possessed.

His victory at this year’s Giro d’Italia suggested that process is complete.

Vingegaard won five stages in Italy and finished more than five minutes clear of Felix Gall. In doing so, he became only the eighth man to win all three Grand Tours. The race was controlled with the tactical perfection that has long characterised Visma at its best. Vingegaard rarely expended effort without gaining something tangible in return, but when he chose to attack, nobody could follow.

The conventional reading is that the Giro must have cost him something. Three weeks of racing in May, followed by a shortened recovery and preparation block, is hardly the obvious route towards beating the most dominant rider in the sport.

Visma see it another way.

Before the Giro, sports director Marc Reef told Domestique that the team’s data showed Vingegaard reaching a slightly higher level at the 2025 Vuelta than at the Tour. “We saw that his level was improving slightly in the second Grand Tour,” he said.

That belief underpins the programme. Visma think one Grand Tour can sharpen Vingegaard for the next rather than simply wear him down.

The results offer no clean comparison. Pogačar was the reference point in France, João Almeida in Spain. Only Visma’s own data can tell them whether that improvement was real.

The Giro was therefore more than an objective in itself. The team also saw it as a way of building Vingegaard towards July.

There were encouraging signs in Italy, where he appeared at his strongest in the final week. Whether that progression can continue into the Tour is another matter. The same workload that raises his level could yet leave a mark when the race reaches its decisive stages.

Still, the logic behind the programme is clear. Visma are not waiting for Pogačar to become weaker. They believe a first Grand Tour can make Vingegaard stronger.

Against this Pogačar, perhaps that is a risk they had to take.

France has been waiting for a Tour winner since Bernard Hinault rode into Paris in yellow in 1985. Every promising French climber since then has eventually been asked to answer a question older than he is.

Paul Seixas is only nineteen, which means the question is more than twice his age.

His rise has been so rapid that caution has struggled to keep pace. Seixas finished second behind Pogačar at Strade Bianche, won three stages and the overall classification at Itzulia Basque Country, and then became the youngest winner in the history of La Flèche Wallonne.

Yet the most impressive performance of his spring did not end in victory.

At Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Pogačar launched his customary offensive on the Côte de La Redoute, climbing it faster than he ever had before. For the previous two years, that acceleration had served as an eviction notice to the rest of the race. This time, Seixas stayed on his wheel.

He was the only rider who could.

That moment did more than confirm his exceptional talent. It returned possibility to a country that had almost stopped expecting it.

When his Tour participation was confirmed in May, Seixas described the race as a childhood dream, but he also offered a phrase that captured both his confidence and the danger surrounding his selection.

“Age is neither a barrier nor an excuse,” he said.

Perhaps not, but it remains a fact.

Seixas has never raced for three weeks. He has never carried expectation through the daily attrition of a Grand Tour, where recovery, positioning and concentration matter almost as much as climbing ability. At the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, he demonstrated both his enormous capacity and the limits of his experience.

After crashing heavily on stage 7, Seixas chased for much of the afternoon and restricted his losses on the Grand Colombier. It was a remarkable performance, one that confirmed his toughness and force of character. He started the final stage the following morning but was withdrawn after struggling on the Col du Pré.

The crash added uncertainty to Seixas’ Tour preparation, but it did not alter the larger story surrounding his debut.

French cycling has found the rider it was waiting for. The challenge is to avoid asking him to settle 41 years of history in his first three weeks.

The healthiest version of hope around Seixas is not that he must win the Tour now. It is that, for the first time in years, France can imagine that he might win it one day.

Remco Evenepoel’s hope is built on a different premise.

He is neither a former Tour winner attempting to recover old ground nor a young rider discovering his limits. Evenepoel’s ability has been established for years. The unresolved issue is whether that ability can be reshaped sufficiently to challenge Pogačar and Vingegaard in the high mountains.

His third place on his Tour debut in 2024 was impressive, but the final margin was sobering. He finished 9:18 behind Pogačar. Evenepoel won the first time trial and rode with intelligence throughout the race, yet he was still operating in a separate contest once the climbing became severe.

The 2025 Tour offered no answer. Evenepoel abandoned on stage 14 after arriving at the race with the lingering effects of injury and illness.

His move to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe was designed to change the trajectory.

“I want to be better than him,” Evenepoel said of Pogačar to Sporza during the winter. “That’s why I came here.”

The statement was characteristically direct, but the more revealing part of the interview came when Evenepoel spoke about needing a new step to “break through a ceiling.”

That is the real purpose of his transfer. Red Bull did not sign Evenepoel to preserve the rider he already was. It brought him into a performance structure shaped by Dan Lorang, whose training methods underpinned his strong start to the season, and then added Tim Heemskerk, the coach who helped guide Vingegaard’s development into a two time Tour winner. 

Together with a stronger Grand Tour roster and a more specialised preparation, those appointments reflect the belief that something in Evenepoel remains to be unlocked.

His Tour build up has reflected that faith.

Evenepoel has not raced since Liège-Bastogne-Liège, where he finished third after mounting a chase following his inability to follow on La Redoute. Red Bull removed the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes from his programme and replaced it with altitude training, course reconnaissance and controlled preparation. By the time he starts in Barcelona, 68 days will have passed since his last competitive appearance.

The team says the objective is for him to arrive completely fresh. It is a precise, almost clinical approach, but also a gamble. Racing provides forms of stress and instinct that cannot be replicated entirely in training, no matter how carefully the sessions are designed.

The Tour route is not obviously tailored to Evenepoel either. There is an opening team time trial in Barcelona, but only one 26 km individual test against the clock. Eight mountain stages and five summit finishes means that he will have to climb closer to Pogačar and Vingegaard than ever before.

That is where the hope of reinvention lies. Not in Evenepoel becoming a different type of rider, but in Red Bull finding a way to extend the limits of the one it inherited.

The Tour will reveal whether the long absence from competition was an act of supreme confidence or evidence of how much still needed to change.