The 2025 Tour de France may only be four days old, but the same question as previous years has cropped up — can Jonas Vingegaard beat Tadej Pogačar? In the Dane’s first Tour win in 2022, he started as the underdog behind the Slovenian who had eased to victory the year before. The most favoured Vingegaard has ever been was in 2023, when he was probably equal favourite to Pogačar on the startline. Since then, thanks to contrasting factors — an almost-career-ending crash for Vingegaard at the 2024 Itzulia Basque Country and the continued rise of Pogačar’s long climbing ability — Vingegaard has been shunted back to the status of an underdog. Before this Tour started, it was the same, with the bookies heavily backing Pogačar, after the world champion’s crushing Critérium du Dauphiné victory.

Pogačar should and will take the plaudits after stage four  — a 100th career victory and an 18th at the Tour at the age of 26 is one of the best returns in history. But today, Vingegaard showed that he is still the only rider capable of keeping up with Pogačar when the road goes uphill. Vingegaard’s form — and the collective performance of Visma — on the first four stages is a sign that the Dane could, maybe, win the Tour. Apart from Mathieu van der Poel’s Classics masterclass at Paris-Roubaix no one has been able to seriously challenge peak Pogačar for over a year.

This is the obstacle facing Vingegaard and his Visma squad. Every discussion of Vingegaard’s yellow jersey chances must be taken with a massive grain of salt, which is Pogačar’s 2024 Tour win, which saw some of the greatest cycling performances of all time. It is for that reason that Vingegaard remains the underdog for this edition. However, in his own previous Tour wins — in 2022 and 2023 — he hadn’t shown the kind of level which saw him storm to victory, particularly the now mythologised stages up the Col du Granon and the time trial to Combloux.  Even last year, he shocked everyone to take his stage win in the Massif Central. Vingegaard is clearly capable of producing some stunning performances — seemingly out of nowhere — but are they enough to beat one of the greatest of all time?

It’s a question that seemed answerable only a few weeks ago at the Dauphiné and with a resounding “no”. His shape has certainly improved since then, and not getting dropped by Pogačar will have given him some confidence today, albeit on a climb of under 1km. There was a moment he looked to be falling back quickly, but in hindsight, it seems that Pogačar had overextended himself in his attack. Both Vingegaard’s stage two attack and handy sprint for third, alongside today’s punchy performance, consolidated the fact that he is indeed in career-best shape, like he claimed before the Grand Départ in Lille. So too, it seems, are his Visma teammates, like Matteo Jorgenson, now fourth on GC. If Visma are to topple Pogačar, they will all need to be firing on all cylinders to win.

(Photo: ASO)

How do they go about doing it? In the past, they have attacked Pogačar’s long climbing ability, exposed any fuelling issues he may have had and used Vingegaard’s superior TT — all of which Pogačar has, to a certain degree, fixed. Beating a generational talent was never going to be easy. But Visma are a team of innovators, well-tuned at conjuring up creative ways of getting results at Grand Tours. It’s not as if they have to look that far back in their history. At May’s Giro d’Italia, Visma’s tactical masterclass on the Colle delle Finestre propelled Simon Yates to victory. All respect to Isaac del Toro and his spell in the maglia rosa, but it must be noted that Tadej Pogačar and the maillot jaune are a different scale of challenge.

So far at this Tour, Visma have brought an aggressive racing style — they bossed the run-in to the final climb on stage four. Their crosswind action on stage one caught out a number of GC contenders — just not their main rival, Pogačar. But they won’t know if they don’t try, and it has made it harder for everyone, and this accumulated fatigue has favoured Vingegaard over Pogačar. 

Ultimately, it could all come down to the watts-per-kilo tests in the Pyrenees and Alps. The 2025 Tour route heavily favours pure climbers, with key ascents like Mont Ventoux and Hautacam, as well as a crucial uphill time trial to Peyragudes on stage 13. These stages are tailor-made for the two-time winner Vingegaard’s steady, high-power climbing style, the same that saw him first drop Pogačar on Ventoux in 2021. If he can match the elevated form that Pogačar brought to the 2024, then the question of whether he can challenge for the maillot jaune will have been answered. Until then, it’s all speculation, which is all part of the fun. 

There is no let-up. With the dust yet to settle on four frenetic opening stages, all eyes now turn to Caen and the first individual time trial. By the end of play tomorrow, after the race of truth, we could see Vingegaard back in the yellow jersey. He sits just eight seconds behind Pogačar, a surmountable gap for the Dane — he has performed miracles on Tour TTs in the past.