CAN anyone beat Tadej Pogacar in this year’s Tour de France?

The world champion’s status as the overwhelming favourite for a fourth career Tour crown is such that even his main rival, Jonas Vingegaard, has been tipping the Slovenian.

Since winning last year’s race by more than six minutes to complete the first Giro-Tour double in 26 years, Pogacar only seems to have got better.

He ended the season by becoming the first male rider to complete the unofficial triple crown, becoming world champion in Switzerland, before adding another Monument to his considerable collection at Il Lombardia.

This year has been no different. In 22 days of competition, Pogacar has racked up 11 wins – even taking a sprint stage on his way to overall victory at the Criterium du Dauphine last month.

The defending champion starts the race on 99 career wins at the age of just 26 – more than any other active male rider. It is not hard to see why many have concluded Pogacar just needs to turn up for Friday’s start in Lille, stay upright, and he will be on his way to victory.

But that is forgetting the manner in which Vingegaard beat Pogacar in both 2022 and 2023.

Their rivalry has quickly taken over cycling as between them they have occupied the top two steps in each of the last four Tours.

Going back to the start of the 2021 Tour race, the first of those one-two finishes, if you remove bonus seconds from their results, only three seconds separated their total times across four editions.

But though Vingegaard, two years older than Pogacar, was well beaten last year, the Dane had come into the Tour having not raced at all since a horror crash at the Tour of the Basque Country the previous April.

His 2025 season has been disrupted too – the Dauphine was his first race since suffering concussion and a broken wrist at Paris-Nice in March – but he looks in much better shape.

In 2022 Vingegaard beat Pogacar by two minutes 43 seconds, but in 2023 the winning margin was seven and a half minutes.

Notably, this year’s race includes the climb of the Hautacam on stage 11, the spot where Vingegaard rode clear to effectively seal his 2022 win, and on stage 18 a finish on the Col de la Loze, where in 2023 Pogacar radioed in to say, “I’m dead, I’m gone” as Vingegaard took off.

Neutrals are hoping this will not be another two-horse race. The man most likely to prevent this, perhaps even the dark horse for victory if the others pay too much attention to one another, is Remco Evenepoel.

The Olympic champion was third on his Tour debut last year, and the 25-year-old heads to Lille looking to show he is the contender he has long been tipped to be.

It is only seven months since Evenepoel was involved in a terrible training accident near his home in Belgium, but he has been showing strong form since opening his 2025 season with victory in De Brabantse Pijl in April.

Pogacar is the favourite for many reasons, but nothing is a lock at the Tour de France.