Analysing the 2026 Tour de France favourites

What more is there to say? Tadej Pogačar is chasing a record-equalling fifth Tour de France victory, and nothing about his 2026 campaign suggests he won’t do it. The world champion focused squarely on one-day racing in the spring, and he collected four wins from five in the Classics, losing out only to Wout van Aert in a tumultuous edition of Paris-Roubaix.

After finishing his Classics campaign by outgunning the young pretender Paul Seixas at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Pogačar eventually toggled into stage racing mode at the Tour de Romandie. Despite being above his usual stage racing weight, Pogačar was as dominant as ever in Switzerland, collecting three stage wins and the overall title.

Pogačar has spent the weeks since training at Sierra Nevada and putting in the specific work required to win the Tour. Expect him to show the fruits of that labour at the revamped Tour de Suisse next week and underscore why he is the overwhelming favourite for the Tour de France.

Pogačar’s greatest rival hasn’t gone away. Winter murmurs about Jonas Vingegaard’s apparent decline seemed a touch overstated given that he had just won the Vuelta a España, and they look outright absurd after his defiant start to his 2026 campaign.

Vingegaard began with assured wins at Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya, and he didn’t break stride at his Giro d’Italia debut, where he won five stages en route to an inevitable overall victory. 

The one question mark in Italy surrounded a subdued time trial, but that’s a minor quibble with an otherwise astounding body of work at the Giro. Like Pogačar in 2024, Vingegaard was never troubled at the Giro, and the second biggest race in cycling doubled as a public training camp. He got exactly what he wanted from May: a full set of Grand Tour victories without coming close to depleting his reserves for the Tour.

The departure of sports director Grischa Niermann is a loss, but it’s offset by the continuity at Visma with Marc Reef stepping up after guiding Vingegaard at the Giro. It mightn’t be enough to upset Pogačar, of course, but Vingegaard has enjoyed his smoothest Tour build-up since his last win in 2023.

We’re completely jumping the gun, of course. Paul Seixas is still only 19 years of age, he’s never raced a Grand Tour, and his lone pro stage race victory so far came in an event for puncheurs rather than pure climbers. His prospects of staying the course for three whole weeks against Pogačar and Vingegaard are far from certain. 

But the youngster has been vastly superior to everyone he’s met this season bar Pogačar and he has seemed to improve on a weekly basis. That makes it hard to put him any lower than third on this list even allowing for his obvious inexperience and the consequent doubts about his aptitude for Grand Tour racing.

The Critérium du Dauphiné, with its demanding finale, will tell us a lot more about Seixas’ credentials and it might well force a hasty rethink of his position on this list. But for now, a month out from the Grand Départ, the prospect of one of the most tumultuous debuts in Tour history is an alluring one.

Del Toro’s performances this season place him firmly among the podium contenders at the Tour de France, but he might still find himself hamstrung by his duties in the service of Pogačar. Much will depend on how the race unfolds. 

In 2024, Pogačar’s dominance was such that João Almeida had the relative freedom to help himself to fourth overall, but Del Toro mightn’t be afforded the same luxury in the presence of a rebooted Vingegaard, the emerging Seixas, a compelling Red Bull duo and more.

Del Toro impressed by winning the UAE Tour in February and he followed up with an assured triumph at Tirreno-Adriatico the following month. The Mexican crashed out of Itzulia Basque Country in April, which ruled him out of the Ardennes Classics, but UAE Team Emirates-XRG sports manager Joxean Matxin Fernandez told Domestique recently that the lay-off had not had any impact on his Tour preparation.

Del Toro’s clash with Seixas at the Dauphiné will be all the more fascinating given UAE’s reported interest in eventually securing the Frenchman’s services as Pogačar’s successor. 

It’s always in the eye of the beholder with Remco Evenepoel. His Red Bull stablemate Florian Lipowitz has been objectively more consistent and stable through the early part of the season, and the German might well prove the more reliable option in July. But at his best, Evenepoel travels to places that few riders can reach, Lipowitz included. 

Evenepoel won the 2022 Vuelta a España after all, and he placed an impressive third on his 2024 Tour debut. Last year, however, he was a shadow of himself in abandoning on the Tourmalet, and it’s not clear what version of Evenepoel we’ll see this July.

It’s been a mixed bag for Evenepoel at Red Bull so far. He scorched the earth at the Volta Valenciana, but then he was subdued at both the UAE Tour and the Volta a Catalunya. Stealth preparations for his striking Tour of Flanders debut might have been a factor. Evenepoel proceeded to win Amstel Gold Race but then was nowhere near Pogačar and Seixas at Liège.

Red Bull subsequently decided to pull Evenepoel from June racing, meaning he will have gone 68 days without competition when the Tour starts. The team’s logic is that a similar break served Evenepoel well at the 2022 Vuelta. The counterargument is that no GC contender in modern Tour history has thrived without a real test in June.

In 2024, a low-key Dauphiné helped Evenepoel thrash himself into shape for the Tour, but last year, the race seemed to tip him over the edge before the main event. Red Bull and Evenepoel’s impulse to give him a controlled pre-Tour environment is understandable – but only time will tell if it’s right.

At the Red Bull training camp in Mallorca last December, Lipowitz was more than happy to let Evenepoel do the talking when they sat down for a joint press conference, and the German will be pleased with how his new teammate has been drawing all the attention ahead of the Tour.

Lipowitz’s consistency was his calling card through the spring of 2025 as he built towards his fine Tour debut, and he has been similarly steady thus far. A lay-off at the end of last season perhaps explained a subdued start at the Volta ao Algarve, but since then, Lipowitz has been his solid but unspectacular self.

He was third behind the unassailable Vingegaard in Catalunya, second behind the untouchable Seixas at Itzulia and second behind the unstoppable Pogačar at Romandie. He’ll go again at the Tour of Slovenia before the Tour. 

Lipowitz won’t trouble the so-called ‘aliens’ at the Tour – but his consistency means he might well stand on the podium beside two of them in Paris.

After finding an exit from what he termed a “dictatorship” at UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Ayuso looked like a man enjoying his newfound freedom in the early weeks of his move to Lidl-Trek. The Spaniard caught the eye with an assured victory ahead of Seixas at the Volta ao Algarve, and he looked destined to go toe-to-toe with Vingegaard at Paris-Nice only to be forced out by a crash while wearing the yellow jersey.

That took all the momentum from Ayuso’s spring. He returned in time to race Itzulia Basque Country only to be forced to abandon due to illness, and he missed a planned outing at the Ardennes Classics.

Since then, Ayuso has been training at Sierra Nevada and recalibrating ahead of his summer campaign. But it’s also been all change at Lidl-Trek, with Luca Guercilena, the man who signed him, forced out in favour of new CEO Andy Schleck.

Ayuso can’t afford to dwell on that, of course. He lines up at the Dauphiné looking to get his season and his Tour challenge back on track, and he won’t be intimidated by the idea of a face-off with Del Toro and Seixas. A strong week in the Alps would see his stock rise rapidly.

As we saw at the Tour of the Alps, the normal rules don’t apply to Tom Pidcock. After placing second on the opening day, his first race since injuring his knee in a horror crash at the Volta a Catalunya the previous month, Pidcock told Domestique that he had just endured his “worst day ever on the bike.” Two days later, Pidcock was back winning, but even then, he insisted that he was still short of his best.

And he wasn’t lying. Pidcock suffered at Liège-Bastogne-Liège the following weekend, but his very presence there and at the Tour of Alps was something of a victory after he suffered bone and ligament damage when he crashed into a ravine in Catalunya.

Pinarello-Q36.5 sports director Kurt Bogaerts explained that Pidcock’s return to racing was less about Liège and more about ensuring he had enough racing days in his legs ahead of his GC challenge at the Tour de France.

Pidcock returns to the Tour with renewed ambition after placing third at last year’s Vuelta, and he’ll warm up with a meeting with Pogačar at the Tour de Suisse. He won’t be expected to push the world champion as close as he did at Milan-Sanremo, but he won’t be daunted by the prospect of racing with him either, which makes this version of Pidcock an intriguing addition to the mix in July.

Like Lipowitz, Johannessen’s consistency is his calling card. The Norwegian hasn’t drawn too much attention to himself so far in 2026, but he also hasn’t fallen any way short of the standards he set for himself last year.

After solid outings on the UAE Tour’s summit finishes, Johannessen took fourth at Tirreno-Adriatico and second at Milano-Torino. When Seixas scorched the earth at Itzulia Basque Country, Johannessen was one of the few to put up any resistance, placing third overall. He was also in the sprint for the final podium place at Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

Johannessen never misses a beat and expect that trend to continue at the Dauphiné. He’s unlikely to trouble Seixas et al for the win, but he’ll be reliably in the picture every time the road climbs.

Based on 2026 form, there are several other riders more deserving of a spot in this list, including Lenny Martinez (Bahrain Victorious), who has quietly enjoyed a fine start to the year, and Matteo Jorgenson (Visma), whose big rendezvous at the Ardennes was ruined by a spring-ending crash at Amstel Gold Race.

Onley, however, placed a doughty fourth overall last year in the colours of Picnic-PostNL and he has since signed up as the figurehead of Netcompany-Ineos’ Tour ambitions. He had a promising start at the team with fourth overall at the Volta ao Algarve, but his season has been subdued ever since illness forced him to abandon Paris-Nice. He could only manage 12th in Catalunya, and he endured another setback when another illness saw him leave the Tour de Romandie on the second day. 

The Scot looked to press reset on his season with a spell of altitude training in May, and the Dauphiné will offer the first real assessment of his Tour prospects after his ill-starred campaign to date. Indeed, it’s a big week all around for Ineos, who also line out with Tour men Kévin Vauquelin and Carlos Rodríguez.