When the Tour de France begins in Barcelona this weekend, there’ll be one big question on everyone’s lips: can anyone beat Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG)? The same question has been asked at many races in recent years and mostly, the answer has been a resounding “no”. It might be a different story this July.
Standing between Pogačar and a record-equalling fifth Tour victory is a genuine challenger in one Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike). The pair have split the last six Tours between them – Pogačar in 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025; Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023 – and both have been phenomenal so far this season, winning just about everything they’ve started (more on that in a moment). But the upcoming Tour de France will be their first meeting in 2026 and only their second rendezvous since the final podium of last year’s Tour.
So as the top two favourites for the 2026 Tour de France get ready to do battle, let’s take a look back at the history of one of modern cycling’s great rivalries.
Dane Cash
Early days
You have to go back to May 2018 to find the first time that Pogačar and Vingegaard raced against one another at a UCI-classified event. That race was the Grand Prix Priessnitz spa, a four-stage U23 Nation’s Cup race in Czechia. Pogačar, racing for the Slovenian national team, won the final stage solo by more than a minute to claim overall honours. Vingegaard, representing Denmark, finished fifth overall, just under a minute down.
They next met at the 2018 Tour de l’Avenir, the U23 equivalent of the Tour de France, which Pogačar also won (ahead of a whole host of present-day talent). Vingegaard finished an anonymous 66th, more than 40 minutes behind.
By the following season they were both racing in the WorldTour – both with the teams they’re still with, interestingly – with Pogačar already starting to amass an impressive collection of results. The pair wouldn’t really battle one another in any serious fashion, though, until the 2021 UAE Tour.
Pogačar won that race overall, courtesy of his stage 3 victory atop Jebel Hafeet, but on stage 5 the two would clash in the battle for stage honours. In the final kilometre of the Jebel Jais climb, Vingegaard punched away from the group containing race leader Pogačar to take what was the biggest win of his career to that point and pave the way for many great GC battles ahead.
Titans of the Tour
Their first tussle at the Tour came just a few months later, in June and July of 2021. Pogačar started as the defending champion – a year after his time trial demoralisation of Primož Roglič on the penultimate stage of the 2020 edition – while Vingegaard was still a rider on the rise, in his very first race of 21 days (his only other Grand Tour before that, the 2020 Vuelta a España, was raced over just 18 stages.) Vingegaard actually started the Tour riding in support of teammate Primož Roglič, but when the Slovenian crashed heavily on stage 3, and ultimately left the race a few days later, Vingegaard became Jumbo-Visma's lone GC contender.
Pogačar dominated the 2021 Tour from early on. After a win in the stage 5 ITT, he moved into the overall lead on stage 8 courtesy of a 30 km solo move on wet roads in the Alps that saw him put more than three minutes into most of his GC rivals, Vingegaard included.
Pogačar would take another two stage wins on his way to winning the Tour by more than five minutes overall. Vingegaard, meanwhile, excelled in his role of stand-in GC leader. He was best of the rest on the two mountain stages Pogačar won late in the race, earning himself second on GC and establishing himself as a bona fide Tour contender for the years ahead.
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