After every Grand Tour route reveal, we find ourselves wondering which stars are best suited to the parcours, and that is no different this week as the ASO unveiled the 21 stages of the 2025 Tour de France on Tuesday. In general, it’s a relatively climber-friendly race, with plenty of major mountain ascents and one hill climb time trial to go with the other TT in the route, which is a flatter affair.
More specifically, it is a route that is likely to have Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) feeling about as content as he can reasonably expect to be – even if Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) is still a clear favorite right now. Neither rider attended the presentation, but Visma’s head of racing, Grischa Niermann, was on hand. We are really happy with the Tour course,” he said in brief remarks to Wielerflits. “It is really something for Jonas.”
Niermann, who replaces the outgoing Merijn Zeeman, cautioned that Vingegaard’s 2025 calendar isn’t set yet – and seemed to re-open the door to a possible Giro d’Italia start – but noted the climbing-heavy Tour route was favorable for his team’s star rider. To put it in another way, no 2025 Tour route was ever going to explicitly favor Vingegaard over Pogačar, but at least this one doesn’t favor the Slovenian as much as it might have.
Let’s break it down.
As has increasingly been the case this millennium, the top Tour contenders are all fantastic high-mountain climbers with excellent time trialing skills. Long gone are the days where climbers without TT talent or TT talents without climbing legs could hope to achieve anything in a Grand Tour general classification. With that in mind, it’s hard to expect any Grand Tour route to massively favor the skillsets of one star contender over another. They’re all really good at this stuff.
That said, there are some areas in which Pogačar is definitely better than Vingegaard, and some where it’s a bit more of a question mark, although it’s not actually clear to this writer whether Vingegaard is definitively better at any major aspect of Grand Tour racing. At the 2024 Tour, Vingegaard and Visma seemed to be banking on the Dane’s strength on the major high-altitude climbs to give him an edge of Pogačar, but it was Pogačar who shone brightest on those days.
Still, Vingegaard has looked better in those situations than Pogačar at times in the past, and who can say for certain whether a healthy Vingegaard, instead of one just months removed from a horrible crash, will be back to his best there in the future? Pogačar, on the other hand, is pretty clearly better than Vingegaard on punchy climbs, any road surface that is not tarmac, and sketchy descents. He probably has the edge in a flat time trial as well. As such, a Tour route spending lots of time in the heart of Classics country is one that would really favor Pogačar – and that’s not what we are getting in 2025.
Next year’s Tour will have no major gravel or cobbled stages. And, while the first week is quite hilly, there are relatively few ultra-explosive climbs like those that have propelled Pogačar to multiple Liège-Bastogne-Liège victories. What the race will have is several grueling days in the Pyrenees and the Alps and visits to iconic ascents like Mont Ventoux and the Tourmalet.
The Tour will also return to the Col de la Loze, the scene of Pogačar’s epic collapse in 2023. Maybe Vingegaard will have a psychological edge on that day as Pogačar tries to avoid reliving the drama so wonderfully delivered to viewers via the race radio broadcast on that day. Niermann appeared to hint at that a little bit, noting to Wielerflits that the route included “climbs that Jonas has good memories of.”
There is also that one flat TT on tap for 2025, but the other – an 11 km climb to Peyragudes – is very much an uphill slog that Vingegaard will probably appreciate.
Given what we saw this year, it’s still entirely possible that Pogačar is the one putting huge time gaps into Vingegaard on these key GC stages in 2025 – but at least it’s more of an unknown than it could be. If Tour organizers had really wanted to give Pogačar an edge over Vingegaard, they could have just drawn up 21 days of the Oude Kwaremont-Paterberg double, where former Tour of Flanders winner Pogačar would have the clear advantage without any good chances for Vingegaard to land a counterpunch.
The long and short of it is this: The 2025 Tour route favors Pogačar simply because he is the best bike racer in the world, but, hey, it could have favored him a lot more! For that, Vingegaard has to be content as he aims to reclaim his crown as the Tour champ next year.
Did we do a good job with this story?