Team UAE’s rider Pogacar goes into the 21-day race in red-hot form after winning the Giro d’Italia in May. Visma’s Vingegaard, the two-time defending champion from Denmark, hasn’t raced since suffering multiple fractures in a fall in March. Vingegaard’s fall offers Slovenia’s Pogacar a chance at revenge for the brutal manner in which the Dane crushed him on two Alpine stages late in the 2023 edition.
“I’ve tested my legs a little and to be honest, I’ve never felt so good on a bike,” said Pogacar, a back-to-back winner in 2020 and 2021. “Everyone thinks that I’m going to win the Tour every year, but I didn’t win the last two times.” While Pogacar dislikes heat and high altitude, Vingegaard is the man on the back foot this year due to the punctured lung and broken ribs he sustained in that March accident.
“Jonas was really badly injured, but I think he’ll be okay. If he is feeling mentally strong and has made a good recovery he will be at his top level,” Pogacar said. Behind these chalk-and-cheese rivals is a bevvy of pretenders awaiting the slightest slip on a treacherous route in a year where bike accidents have hogged the headlines.
Veteran Primoz Roglic has won the Vuelta a Espana and the Giro in his career and will be riding the Tour in the colours of new sponsor Red Bull, a new contract worth six million euros a year in his back pocket. Also in the mix is the impossible-to-ignore talent of Belgian Remco Evenepoel (Quick Step), who will ta.
