Analysing the 2026 Tour de France favourites

Pogačar is chasing a record-equalling fifth Tour victory and on the evidence of the past two seasons of complete dominance on all terrains, it’s difficult to imagine him falling short in that quest. 

Despite expressing a certain ennui regarding the world’s biggest bike race last summer, Pogačar dominated the 2025 Tour, essentially winning while pulling up in the manner of Usain Bolt in his pomp. Indeed, over the past two Tours, Pogačar’s only misstep came when he was caught and then outsprinted by Jonas Vingegaard at Le Lioran in 2024. 

The gaps in Pogačar’s armoury that were exposed by Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023 apparently no longer seem to exist. In his imperial phase, Pogačar seems inured to the effects of altitude, extreme heat and the third week. 

At this point, Pogačar is his own biggest rival and keeping him interested seems to be half the battle for UAE. To that, he focused purely on one-day racing in the opening months of the season, before making debuts at the Tour de Romandie and the Tour de Suisse as he flits into stage racing mode for the summer.

Vingegaard is the only man to have beaten Pogačar at the Tour, and he proved it was no fluke by doing it twice. The problem, however, is that Pogačar has responded to those defeats by taking cycling to hitherto unseen levels of performance and, for the last two years at least, Vingegaard’s best has not been enough to trouble his old rival in the slightest.

With that in mind, Vingegaard has elected to make his Giro d’Italia debut in 2026 with a view to completing a full set of Grand Tour victories. Visma and Vingegaard have been keen to suggest that riding the Giro will improve his prospects in the Tour. That remains to be seen, but winning the Giro would at least give Vingegaard something tangible to show for his season before facing into a Tour where Pogačar is the overwhelming favourite.

Vingegaard has never finished lower than second at the Tour in five appearances. Visma’s gamble is that he will continue that trend in 2026 even with the Giro in his legs – and if Pogačar somehow falters, the Dane would still be the man most likely to benefit. 

The 2025 Tour ended in disappointment for Evenepoel, who abandoned on the Col du Tourmalet on stage 14 after running into difficulty as soon as the race hit the Pyrenees. That setback immediately raised the old questions about his true ceiling as a Grand Tour rider, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that, despite his struggles, Evenepoel was still lying third overall when he pulled out of the Tour. 

Shortly after the Tour, Evenepoel confirmed his transfer from Soudal-QuickStep to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, and his new team is adamant that he can improve enough with their support to challenge Pogačar’s hegemony in the years ahead.

2026 will be the first test of that project, and Red Bull have signalled their intentions by resisting the temptation to send Evenepoel to a rouleur-friendly Giro. Instead, he builds towards the Tour, where he shares leadership with Florian Lipowitz. Despite a less than amenable route, anything less than a podium finish will be a disappointment for Evenepoel and Red Bull.

Lipowitz placed a fine third in 2025 after underlining his quality throughout the year with a series of assured performances in week-long stage races, and expectations are steadily rising in Germany about his future prospects. As a relative latecomer to the sport, he also would appear to have ample margin for improvement.

Superseding Primoz Roglič in the Red Bull hierarchy last year wasn’t enough to ensure outright leadership for Lipowitz at this year’s Tour, but the arrival of Evenepoel as a teammate isn’t necessarily a disadvantage for him.

If Red Bull’s media day is any guide, then Evenepoel will draw a lot of the attention and external pressure away from Lipowitz between now and July, and that won’t displease the softly spoken German. The pair will race together at the Volta a Catalunya in March.

Red Bull’s idea is that Evenepoel and Lipowitz will form a tandem against Pogačar at the Tour, but at some point a leadership hierarchy will take shape – perhaps as soon as the final haul up Montjuïc in the team time trial on the opening day.

It’s a big year for Ayuso, who finally gets the chance to lead at the Tour de France after extricating himself from his contract at UAE Team Emirates-XRG in the most fractious of circumstances. 

His only previous outing at the Tour came in 2024, when he abandoned early with COVID-19, but only after drawing criticism for his apparent reluctance to ride in support of Pogačar on the Galibier. In hindsight, that episode seemed to mark the beginning of the end of Ayuso’s time at UAE.

Ayuso’s 2025 season was a mixed bag. He showcased his class at Tirreno-Adriatico, but he was superseded by teammate Isaac del Toro at the Giro before abandoning the race through injury in the final week. His GC challenge collapsed immediately at the Vuelta, but he then won two stages either side of the announcement of his departure from UAE.

Ayuso will hope for calmer waters at Lidl-Trek, and he has set himself the target of a podium finish at the Tour. He showed his aptitude for Grand Tour racing when he finished third on the 2022 Vuelta when he was still a teenager – now he needs to start delivering on that promise.

After Isaac del Toro came within a mountain pass of winning the Giro d’Italia last year, it was widely expected that he would return to the corsa rosa in 2026. Instead, UAE have handed leadership in Italy to João Almeida, while Del Toro has been drafted into the Tour line-up.

The Mexican would be higher on this list if he weren't starting as a deluxe domestique for Pogačar, and there is not likely to be any doubt about the internal hierarchy. Even so, that might not stop Del Toro from claiming a high overall finish in Paris. Almeida placed fourth in 2024 while working for Pogačar, after all, while Adam Yates took third behind his leader in 2023.

Still only 22, Del Toro recovered quickly from his Giro heartbreak, racking up 14 wins in the final months of the season. If he continues to progress at the same rate in 2026, he may very well be in the shake-up for a podium finish at the Tour, even allowing for his domestique duties. The UAE Tour in February will give him an early chance to test his progress against Vingegaard and Evenepoel.

Onley placed a fine fourth at last year’s Tour, where he underscored Picnic-PostNL’s long-proven ability to scout and develop talent. That performance sparked interest in his services from across the WorldTour, and in late December, Ineos Grenadiers announced that they had brokered a deal to extricate Onley from his contract with Picnic-PostNL for 2026.

Onley’s arrival gives Ineos a focal point for the Tour after years of increasing irrelevance in July, while the Scot will hope that moving to a team with deeper resources can bring him to the next level in his career.

Although Onley was more than 12 minutes down on Pogačar at the end of last year’s Tour, he was altogether closer to the podium, reaching Paris just over a minute behind Lipowitz. That offers hope for 2026, but no guarantees. Given the likely level of competition in July, Onley could improve on his 2025 levels and still fall short of the same result.

The Briton has so far only confirmed his race programme up until Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but it seems a certainty that he will return to the Tour de France after a one-year hiatus, with Pinarello-Q36.5 automatically securing a wildcard invitation. 

Pidcock took a calculated risk in leaving Ineos to join a Pro Continental team last year, but the gamble would pay off by season’s end. During Pidcock’s time at Ineos, he seemed reluctant to commit to fashioning himself into a Grand Tour contender, but he has now proven his mettle over three weeks with a dogged third place on last year’s Vuelta a España.

The Tour is an altogether different challenge, of course, and Pidcock will face considerably deeper competition. But it’s worth bearing in mind that he placed 13th and 16th overall in previous Tours when his main target was stage victories. With a definite GC focus this time around, Pidcock would expect a top 10 finish, and he surely will be keen to test himself further after the encouraging signs from the Vuelta. 

Last season saw the Norwegian begin to deliver in earnest on the potential he showed when he won the 2021 Tour de l’Avenir ahead of Carlos Rodríguez. An assured display in elite company at the Critérium du Dauphiné was followed by a consistent showing in July that carried him to sixth overall at the Tour.

The question for 2026 is whether Johannessen can build on that platform and move closer to the podium. While he was a reliably steady performer across the three weeks of the Tour, his eventual sixth place still owed something to Primoz Roglič’s plummet in the standings amid his all-or-nothing attacks in the Alps.

At 26, however, Johannessen has margin for improvement and his Uno-X squad, now in the WorldTour, will be aiming higher in 2026.

Seixas is still a teenager and it’s not even clear if he will ride the Tour in 2026, but the Frenchman still warrants inclusion on this list given his enormous potential. Amid weighty expectations in his neo-pro season, Seixas placed eighth at the Dauphiné, won the Tour de l’Avenir and then took bronze in a most demanding European Championships road race, beaten only by Pogačar and Evenepoel.

Those displays – not to mention the preternatural calm with which he carries himself – mean that France has been turning its lonely eyes to Seixas as the man most likely to break the home nation’s long drought since Bernard Hinault’s final Tour win in 1985.

Given his age and the exalted opposition, Seixas wouldn’t be a potential winner of the 2026 Tour and that has sparked its own debate, with Cyrille Guimard adamant that he shouldn’t ride the race until he’s ready to win it.

Decathlon are hedging their bets for now, but it’s notable that Felix Gall, fifth on the 2025 Tour, is currently slated to ride the Giro and Vuelta this season.