IT IS OFTEN said that the Tour de France is the one race that brings together the best of the best, all at the peak of their fitness and with no other objectives in mind, in the battle for yellow.

But this year there are big questions to ask of all the primary contenders.

Two-time defending champion Jonas Vingegaard, two-time winner Tadej Pogacar, Primoz Roglic and Remco Evenepoel dominate the discussion, but there is reason to doubt each of them — perhaps opening the door for challenges from elsewhere.

Pogacar is many people’s favourite in large part because the UAE Team Emirates man is the only one of the quartet to have avoided any serious setbacks this season.

The Slovenian crushed the opposition to win the Giro d’Italia by nearly 10 minutes, winning six stages, in a display of utter dominance.

It followed wins in the Volta a Catalunya, Strade-Bianche and Liege-Bastogne-Liege. The only race Pogacar has entered and not won this season is Milan-San Remo, where he took third.

But no man has done the Giro-Tour double since Marco Pantani did so in a very different age in 1998. Alberto Contador, Vincenzo Nibali and Chris Froome have all tried, and all failed, since.

Vingegaard got the better of Pogacar in each of the past two Tours, and would have been confident of doing so again even before Pogacar set his sights on Giro glory.

But the Dane has not raced since suffering a broken collarbone, several broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a contusion to that lung in a horror crash at the Itzulia Basque Country in early April, spending 12 days in hospital.

Vingegaard returned to training in May but the Visma-Lease a Bike team, snake-bitten by crashes all year long, waited until last week to confirm the 27-year-old will even start the Tour.

Perhaps the door is open for Roglic, so close to winning the 2020 Tour before Pogacar stole in at the last.

But Roglic is now 34 — were he to win he would be the second-oldest winner of the yellow jersey ever.

The Bora-Hansgrohe rider, also caught in that Basque crash, won the Criterium du Dauphine earlier this month, once a traditional predictor of Tour success.

But the manner in which he did so, dropped on the final mountain and scraping success by a mere eight seconds, was hardly convincing.

Evenepoel is the other young pretender to the crown. The 24-year-old of Soudal-QuickStep is already a former world champion and won the Vuelta a Espana in 2022, but this will be only his fifth Grand Tour and his Tour de France debut.

He too was in that Basque crash, missing two months before returning at the Dauphine, where he rode to seventh overall, winning the time trial but finishing nearly two-and-a-half minutes behind Roglic.

So who to believe in? Maybe none of them. Maybe the Ineos Grenadiers can win their first Tour since 2019. Bernal, winner that year, is looking better and better as he puts his horror training crash in 2022 behind him, while young Spaniard Carlos Rodriguez finished fifth last year.

Maybe, should Pogacar falter, UAE will turn to Adam Yates in a similar fashion to Geraint Thomas emerging as Team Sky’s best bet — and the winner — in 2018 as a Giro win took its toll on Froome.

The battle will to go to the final day. The Olympics mean the Tour will, for the first time, not finish in Paris or its surrounding region, but instead in Nice, where a stage-21 time trial will mean there is no final day procession but a battle to the wire.

Who might emerge in yellow is an unusually open question.