Pogacar's Tour-Vuelta double bid: The lessons from those who tried before

It’s more than three decades since the Vuelta a España shifted to its current slot after the UCI enacted a radical reform of the calendar ahead of the 1995 season. The change raised hopes in Spain that Miguel Induráin, who won a record-equalling fifth Tour de France that summer, would return to the Vuelta after a long hiatus in a bid to complete a full set of Grand Tour triumphs.

It wasn’t to be. Induráin opted for a stint of altitude training in Colorado ahead of an expedition to Colombia, where he won the World Championships time trial, took silver in the road race and then made an ill-fated tilt at the Hour Record. 

The much-trumpeted Vuelta return would finally happen a year later, but only when Induráin had been deposed as Tour champion, reaching Paris in 11th place. He recovered sufficiently to win Olympic time trial gold in Atlanta, and his paymasters at Banesto then pushed for him to line up the Vuelta too. 

Banesto manager José Miguel Echavarri summed up the situation pointedly: “The Vuelta in September is like a resit for riders who have failed their exams in July in the Tour.”

Induráin abandoned that Vuelta on the road to Lagos da Covadonga before announcing his retirement in the winter, but Echavarri’s formula about the race being a redo for riders who fell short at the Tour rang truer by the year.

Alex Zülle won in 1996 and 1997 after ill-starred Tours, while Abraham Olano triumphed in 1998 after abandoning in July. Jan Ullrich’s 1999 triumph came after injury had forced him to miss the Tour altogether. 

All the while, reigning Tour champions gave the Vuelta a wide berth, preferring to end their seasons in late summer than sign up for another Grand Tour. That thinking would dominate all the way until 2008, when Carlos Sastre followed up his surprise Tour victory with a tilt at the Vuelta. 

This year, Tadej Pogačar becomes only the fourth reigning Tour champion to ride the Vuelta since the calendar reset in 1995. We look back at those who came before him – including two other riders who took a shot at the Vuelta-Tour double without necessarily realising it at the time.

No matter what the record books say, the 2006 Tour will always be known as Floyd Landis’ race. The American’s solo raid to Morzine was one of the most astonishing afternoons in Tour history, and his subsequent positive test for testosterone precipitated the most rapid and harrowing downfall of a yellow jersey. 

The 2006 Tour had been a bizarre race from the outset, with favourites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso ruled out on the eve of the Grand Départ after they were implicated in the Operación Puerto blood doping inquiry. 

The race itself was just as strange. Óscar Pereiro surprisingly moved into the lead on stage 13 after Landis’ Phonak team deliberately gave the break a half-hour advantage to rid themselves of the yellow jersey.

Landis, the superior climber, took it back at Alpe d’Huez but then cracked abruptly at La Toussuire. His Morzine effort brought him back into contention and he took yellow from Pereiro in the final time trial.

News of his positive test broke the following week, however, and suddenly Pereiro found himself on the cusp of Tour victory all over again. His victory would only be formally ratified the following year, but the Spaniard lined up for the start of the Vuelta in Malaga as the 2006 Tour winner in waiting.

That did little to alter his place in the hierarchy at Caisse d’Epargne. Alejandro Valverde had been the team leader at the Tour only to crash out in the opening week and at the Vuelta, despite some lip service to Pereiro’s surprising new status, their roles were clear. “I bet that Valverde will win the Vuelta,” Pereiro said beforehand.

Valverde would place second behind Alexandre Vinokourov, while Pereiro laboured to 49th overall.

Carlos Sastre was something of a paradox in that he was both a surprising Tour winner and a very logical one for the year that was in it. Defending champion Alberto Contador was absent as ASO barred the Johan Bruyneel-managed Astana squad due to its doping history, while a new test for CERA saw Riccardo Riccò and Saunier Duval removed from the equation after they had set the race alight in the Pyrenees.

A tense Tour ensued, with Cadel Evans facing off against a deep CSC squad. Sastre won the internal battle by escaping at Alpe d’Huez to take the yellow jersey, and that sufficed to hold off Evans in the final time trial to seal overall victory in Paris.

Shortly afterwards, Sastre confirmed he would ride the Vuelta, which would see him face off against the man he succeeded as Tour champion. Contador had already won the Giro in May, and after cooling his heels in July, he was primed to prove a point in his Vuelta debut. Sastre, whose Tour win had been unfairly damned with faint praise, probably felt the same way. 

Back then, five weeks separated the Tour from the Vuelta, and Sastre raced twice in the interim, abandoning the Clásica San Sebastián and placing 48th at the Beijing Olympics. Before the start in Granada, Sastre and Contador each described the other as the logical favourite. 

Contador established an early lead over Sastre in the stage 5 time trial in Ciudad Real, and while the Tour winner was as consistent as ever across the three weeks, he never really looked like getting back on terms with his rival.

The decisive blow was struck on the Angliru on stage 13, where Contador won the day to stretch Sastre’s deficit beyond three minutes. Sastre would get no closer, finishing third at 3:41, while Contador completed his Grand Tour trilogy by winning the race from his Astana teammate Levi Leipheimer.

Unlike Pereiro in 2006, who had an inkling that the Tour would eventually be on his palmarès, Andy Schleck had no idea that he was riding for a Grand Tour double when he arrived at the start of the 2010 Vuelta in Seville.

For the second year in a row, Schleck had reached Paris in second place behind Contador, and although he had run the Spaniard altogether closer than in 2009, he came away with real regrets and a sense that he had squandered a real opportunity. 

He wasn’t to know, of course, that Contador would eventually be stripped of that Tour victory. News of Contador’s positive test only broke on September 30 of that year, and the Spaniard would not be sanctioned until February 2012. 

Poignantly, Schleck only received his trophy from President François Hollande in a private ceremony in the Élysées Palace in the winter of 2014, two months after injury had prematurely ended his career.

All that was in the future when Schleck lined up at the Vuelta for one of the more bizarre episodes of his career. On the eve of the Tour, it emerged that a cohort of Saxo Bank riders, including Schleck, his brother Frank, Fabian Cancellara and Stuart O’Grady, would leave for the new Leopard Trek team in 2011.

Despite their imminent departure, that quartet was included in the Tour line-up, though Andy Schleck was adamant that he was present to support his brother Frank’s GC ambitions rather than to chase a high overall finish of his own.

Schleck was as good as his word. He coughed up 14 minutes on stage 3 to Malaga and again on the uphill finale at Valdepeñas de Jaén the following day. By the first rest day, Schleck was almost 40 minutes down in 77th overall, and he had scarcely been seen in support of his brother.

When the race resumed in Tarragona, Schleck was no longer in the peloton at all. It soon emerged that he and O’Grady had been sent home for what Saxo Bank discreetly called “internal disciplinary reasons.”

Schleck admitted to “going out for a drink after dinner,” though Riis later suggested the problem wasn’t so much going out as not coming back until 5am. Whatever the details, the double attempt that was never was had come to a definitive end.

No Tour champion ever placed as much emphasis on the Vuelta as Froome, who lined up at the race as a matter of habit during his spell as the sport’s pre-eminent Grand Tour rider. He tackled the Vuelta six times in seven years as he stubbornly sought to add the race to his palmarès. 

He wasn’t to know that he had already won it at the first attempt. In 2019, Froome was retroactively awarded the 2011 Vuelta when Juan José Cobo was stripped of the maillot rojo due to the irregularities in his biological passport. By then, Froome had already won another Vuelta on the road, and his repeated attempts to capture the prize had been a recurring coda to his Tour victories.

The 2011 Vuelta had marked Froome’s breakthrough as a Grand Tour rider, while his fourth-place finish in 2012 had the feel of a test from Team Sky, who were curious to see if he could handle the hardship of another three weeks after placing second at the Tour and riding the London Olympics. 

Froome skipped the race after winning the Tour in 2013, but he returned a year later after an early crash had ended his yellow jersey defence in the opening week. In a high-octane Vuelta, he was beaten to the red jersey by a resurgent Contador, who had also been forced out of the Tour through injury.

That defeat seemed to light a fire in Froome, who won the next three editions of the Tour and made a point of doggedly pursuing Vuelta victory immediately afterwards on each occasion.

In 2015, Froome was in the mix after week one, even if he was clearly not as sharp as he had been in July, but his race ended when he broke his foot in a crash on the ludicrously difficult day in Andorra on stage 11.

Twelve months later, Froome looked a likely Vuelta winner even after Nairo Quintana defeated him at Lagos da Covadonga on stage 10, given the late time trial to Calpe. The Vuelta spiralled beyond his and Sky’s control, however, on stage 15 to Formigal, when he missed an early break triggered by a Contador Hail Mary effort. 

It left Froome 3:34 down, and victory in the time trial served only to cement second place rather than challenge Quintana. It also suggested that the Vuelta was too unruly a race for Sky to control in the same manner as the Tour, while Froome himself was – understandably – running on fumes by September. 

That didn’t deter him from trying again in 2017, and this time the stars aligned. Froome moved into red early, on stage 3 to Andorra, and he held the lead all the way to Madrid. Vincenzo Nibali proved his most dogged foe, but Froome managed to hold him at arm’s length, winning atop Cumbre del Sol and then extending his buffer to almost two minutes in the Logroño time trial in the final week.

Nibali kept the contest alive by clawing back 40 seconds at Los Machucos, but Froome struck back a day later and sealed the race by outlasting the Italian on the Angliru on the final weekend. 

In keeping with a recurring theme of Vuelta-Tour double attempts, mind, doubts were cast on the result when it emerged that Froome had tested positive for salbutamol during the race, but the case was dropped in June 2018, by which point he had completed a full set of Grand Tour wins. 

Twelve months ago, Vingegaard won his first Vuelta after placing second behind Pogačar at the Tour, but he might have claimed the maillot rojo two years earlier had he not found himself hemmed in by team tactics.

After winning his second consecutive Tour in 2023, Vingegaard quickly confirmed his Vuelta participation, where he would link up with Giro d’Italia winner Primož Roglič in the Jumbo-Visma line-up.

Roglič had started the 2022 Tour as Vingegaard’s co-leader before a crash ruined his challenge, but in 2023, he was deemed surplus to requirements for the Tour, precipitating his departure to Bora-Hansgrohe at season’s end. 

That transfer was still speculative when the Vuelta began, but it was clear that Jumbo-Visma’s leadership contest would go a long way to deciding the race, despite the presence of defending champion Remco Evenepoel.

The internal competition became altogether more complicated, however, when Sepp Kuss soloed to victory from the break on stage 6 to Javalambre, gaining three minutes on Vingegaard and Roglič in the process. He moved into red two days later, leaving Visma with a dilemma over whether to defend his lead or give Vingegaard and Roglič the freedom to contest the win.

The picture was muddied further by Vingegaard’s sub-par time trial in Valladolid, though the decision-making moved entirely in-house when Evenepoel cracked on the Aubisque on stage 13. Vingegaard’s win that day moved him to third overall, 1:44 down on Kuss and just seven seconds behind Roglič, a status quo that held until the final week.

Another win at Bejes on stage 16 saw Vingegaard close to within 29 seconds of Kuss. It seemed as though the Visma trio were simply going to race one another for victory, though the Dane was coy about the details that evening: “I just want to enjoy this moment and not think about that.”

On the Angliru a day later, Roglič attacked to claim stage victory from Vingegaard, but Kuss battled to third on the stage, limiting his losses to 19 seconds. Vingegaard was now just eight seconds off red, but he seemed uneasy about how he and Roglič had ridden away from their teammate and race leader in the finale. 

Afterwards, Vingegaard suggested that Roglič had been keen to race for red, while he had preferred to ride in support of Kuss. “It’s a team sport, and Sepp has helped me so many times, so why should I stab him in the back? That's not who I am as a person,” Vingegaard told TV2. “I was put in a somewhat difficult situation, where I perhaps felt that I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

There were no further deviations from the script on the final summit finish at La Cruz de Linares, where Vingegaard raced in support of Kuss, pointedly sitting up in the closing metres to allow him to extend his lead. 

Jumbo-Visma would sweep the podium and the year’s Grand Tours, but Vingegaard – almost certainly the strongest rider in the race – would leave the Tour-Vuelta double behind him.

Pogačar steps up to the plate in 2026, returning to the Vuelta for the first time since he placed third as a neo-pro seven years ago. He has won almost everything there is to win in the meantime, including a Giro-Tour double in 2024. 

The past three decades demonstrate that the Tour-Vuelta double is a complicated feat to achieve, but Pogačar has repeatedly shown that the normal rules don’t apply. The lessons of history probably don’t either.