One battle after another: Vingegaard still leads resistance to Pogacar at the Tour

By the time last year’s Tour de France rolled around, the goalposts had already moved, but Jonas Vingegaard and Visma Lease a Bike kept hitting the same shot over and again. But even though they kept missing the target, their loyalty to the playbook was perhaps understandable.

Vingegaard’s Tour victories of 2022 and 2023, after all, had been built around an unshakeable belief that his powers of endurance were superior to those of Tadej Pogačar, and they stuck to that credo in the two years that followed.

Even when Vingegaard and his old foe had looked inseparable through the first two weeks of the 2023 Tour, he repeatedly brushed off the notion that it might all go down to the wire like Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon in 1989. “The Tour will be decided by minutes,” Vingegaard kept telling us in his press conferences. 

He was as good as his word. A ten-second lead on Pogačar mushroomed to almost two minutes in the Combloux time trial at the start of the third week. A day later, Vingegaard tacked on close to another six minutes when Pogačar cracked on the Col de la Loze. Game over.

That second Tour triumph proved, lest there were any doubts, that Vingegaard’s 2022 victory had been no sucker punch. Pogačar was the more versatile cyclist, but Vingegaard looked the perfect prototype of a Tour rider.

July heat, high altitude and the cumulative exertions of three-week racing all seemed to reward Vingegaard’s stamina over Pogačar’s exuberance. It seemed as though Visma had discovered his kryptonite.

It’s easy to forget it now, but when 2024 dawned, Vingegaard looked the more likely Tour winner, and Pogačar’s decision to make his Giro d’Italia debut that year initially seemed to confirm as much. Pogačar was taking aim at the Giro-Tour double, but it was also about banking something tangible from the season before a 50-50 (at best) contest with Vingegaard in July.

Pogačar’s gamble paid off in full. That winter, Javier Sola had taken over as his coach and a series of tweaks saw the Slovenian firm up just about every weakness in his armoury. After seeing off allcomers at the Giro, he remained in beast mode for the Tour, clocking up six stage wins on the way to a crushing victory.

Vingegaard, inevitably, was in second place, but there was obvious mitigation. He had crashed heavily at Itzulia Basque Country in April, spending a chunk of time in intensive care, and it was already a minor miracle that he could race at all. 

He even raised hopes of a real contest in the second week when he pipped Pogačar at Le Lioran, but an abyss developed between the two favourites once they hit the Pyrenees. Visma clung to the idea that the altitude of the Col de la Bonette on stage 19 could turn the tide in their favour, but it was a forlorn hope. Vingegaard himself called off the planned offensive over the summit, and Pogačar hoovered up the stage win.

While this was clearly a very different Pogačar to the one they had slain in 2022 and 2023, Visma seemed to place at least as much emphasis on the fact that Vingegaard had been hampered by his Itzulia crash. They approached the 2025 Tour seemingly still convinced that Vingegaard could outlast his rival in the third week.

In truth, they were guilty of fighting the previous battle. Visma diligently parked themselves at the head of the peloton throughout the race, seeking to exert pressure on Pogačar at every opportunity, but they were not facing the same foe as before. 

This was a more disciplined Pogačar as well as a stronger one, and he wasn’t going to punch himself out as he had done in the past. Instead, it was Vingegaard who never managed to lay a glove on him. By the end of three weeks of racing, his total gains on Pogačar amounted to two measly bonus seconds on the last summit finish at La Plagne. Back to the drawing board.

Pogačar’s supremacy over the past two Julys has prompted a change in approach from Vingegaard. He restored some confidence with a morale-boosting triumph at the Vuelta a España, and soon afterwards, he made clear his desire to add the Giro to his palmarès in 2026.

In many respects, he found himself in precisely the same position as Pogačar two years previously. Targeting the Giro was a way of saving his season before the Tour even began, and if the effort helped him in July too, then so much the better.

Like Pogačar in 2024, Vingegaard also rang some changes for the new campaign. Just before the season began, Visma confirmed that his long-term coach Tim Heemskerk was leaving due to apparent creative differences with the team. 

Whatever the reason, Heemskerk has since been employed by Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, while Visma’s head of performance Mathieu Heijboer began overseeing Vingegaard’s coaching. There appears to have been greater continuity than Pogačar experienced with his switch to working under Sola’s tutelage. “It’s not like there’s a completely new reality. We’ve still got the same way of working,” Heijboer told The Athletic recently.

That has been borne out in Vingegaard’s campaign to date. While he has enjoyed his best-ever start to a season, with dominant wins at Paris-Nice, the Volta a Catalunya and the Giro d’Italia, there has been no jarring change in style, no obvious new addition to his weaponry in the manner of the seated acceleration that Pogačar developed with Sola.

Perhaps the biggest change for Vingegaard has simply been that he has stayed free of the kind of lasting injuries and illnesses that blighted his Tour preparation for the past two years. In 2024, the Itzulia crash ruined his build-up to the Tour, while last year’s spring campaign was cut short by a concussion sustained at Paris-Nice. This time out, Vingegaard has enjoyed a clear run.

As was the case for Pogačar in 2024, that clear run extended to the Giro. Ominous warnings from men like Gilberto Simoni about the very specific challenges of the corsa rosa came to nothing. One subdued time trial aside, Vingegaard endured no scares at the Giro, which had been reduced to a public training camp long before Rome. He won five stages without ever looking like he was depleting his reservoirs for July. Mission accomplished, and then some. 

“It sounds arrogant – which we aren’t – but yes, it looked as easy as it seemed,” Heijboer told Dutch podcast In de Waaier after the Giro.

One striking feature of the Giro was the tweak to Visma’s traditional mode of racing. At the Tour over the years, Vingegaard’s team had channelled Cadel Evans’ BMC guard by parking themselves at the head of the peloton for 21 days. 

At the Giro, with Marc Reef calling the plays from the team car, they occasionally mirrored Marco Pantani’s Mercatone Uno by massing at the back of the bunch around Vingegaard. Rather than maintaining a constant level of stress across 21 days, Visma seemed to be picking and choosing their battles. They were no longer seeking to win by attrition but by striking in specific moments.

The shallower Giro field is perhaps more forgiving of that approach, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see it replicated in some form at the Tour, where Reef will again be the play caller after head of racing Grischa Niermann’s surprise defection to Lidl-Trek.

Last year certainly demonstrated that the old tactic of betting the house on Vingegaard outlasting Pogačar over three weeks is no longer enough against this astonishing iteration of the world champion. A touch more variety and invention will be required.

Still, Visma believe this version of Vingegaard is a significant improvement on the past two years, and the Giro backed up that view. His power-to-weight ratio crept up across the three weeks. Most estimates placed his best performances there in line with his displays on last year’s Tour, and there’s every reason to believe he will be better in July.

The problem, of course, is that Pogačar looks to be on a similar trajectory. His numbers when winning the Tour de Romandie were tempered by the fact he had just come off the spring classics. A stint at altitude in Sierra Nevada in May sparked a striking improvement, and Pogačar’s exhibition on the final day of the Tour de Suisse was a chilling message to Vingegaard, Paul Seixas and all others about the direction of travel in July.

There are valid concerns, too, about Vingegaard’s supporting cast, given Wout van Aert’s absence and given that three of his teammates – Victor Campenaerts, Sepp Kuss and Davide Piganzoli – also raced the Giro in May. Two years ago, by contrast, Pogačar had seven fresh teammates by his side for the Tour, which says plenty about the respective depth at UAE and Visma.

But then again, the daunting nature of the challenge has always seemed to be part of the appeal for Vingegaard, who has never finished lower than second in his five Tour appearances. His duel with Pogačar is, by a distance, the most sustained the Tour has ever known.

When their rivalry began on the 2021 Tour, Pogačar looked to be light years ahead of Vingegaard, who was a surprise second after stepping into the injured Primoz Roglic’s spot. But twelve months later, Vingegaard achieved the improbable by humbling Pogačar on the Col du Granon, and he did it all over again on the Col de la Loze in 2023. 

The game has moved on since, and yet Vingegaard keeps on fighting and keeps on adapting. Pogačar looks to have rolled out another intimidating upgrade for 2026, and in many respects, this Tour should be a foregone conclusion – but Vingegaard’s presence and persistence keeps it compelling. Imagine what it would look like if he wasn’t there.