Five moments that defined the race for the yellow jersey at the 2024 Tour de France

Jonas Vingegaard follows Tadej Pogačar during the Tour de France gravel stage (Image credit: Zac Williams/SWpix)

Weighty chapters of Tour de France history have been built around duels, but the great bike race has never seen a duopoly like this one. Almost inevitably, and for the fourth year in succession, Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard occupied the top two steps on the podium at the end of three weeks.

Pogačar’s third Tour victory saw him level his head-to-head series with Vingegaard at 2-2, and at this juncture, few would wager against the contest repeating itself in July 2025 – even if Remco Evenepoel’s fine debut and clear margin for improvement gives him ample to reason to believe he can eventually muscle in on their territory.

For some outside observers, the 2024 Tour de France GC battle had been supposed to start and end in Italy. By stage 4 and the ascent of the Galibier, according to experienced and outspoken French sports director Marc Madiot in his pre-race interviews, Tadej Pogačar would have wiped out any traces of GC opposition and the battle for the stage wins and minor classifications should have been well underway.

It hadn’t happened. On stage 1, a show of strength by UAE on the brutally difficult series of climbs out of the Grand Départ at Firenze had been called off halfway through. Instead, the breakaways and a smaller group of sprinters battled it out for the first stage win of the Tour, with Romain Bardet and DSM-Firmenich-PostNL teammate Frank van den Broek dramatically fending off the chase. Then on stage 2, Pogačar again failed to launch one of his expected long-distance solo moves over the repeat ascents of the brutally steep San Luca climb in Bologna and instead his much shorter attack brought an equally committed response from arch-rival Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease A Bike).

So if Madiot had got it wrong, the next obvious flashpoint was the horrendously difficult, punchy Alpine trek on stage 4. Preceded by the interminable but largely manageable ascent to Sestriere and then the much shorter cat. 2 climb of the Montgenèvre on the French side of the Alpine border, it barely mattered that the Galibier was then tackled on its ‘easier’, southern approach road. Albeit by just a day compared to the 2023 Tour’s first-week incursion into the Pyrenees, there had never been such a tough stage so early on in the race. And by this point, Pogačar’s relatively unhurried (or ineffectual, depending on how you looked at it) start to the Tour had begun to create a rash of question marks.

The UAE show of strength continued all the way out of the mountain city of Briançon and onto the interminably long drag of the unclassified Col de Lauteret. In a repetition of the mountain stages to come, too, an oversized, overly disorganised breakaway slowly crumbled to bits as their lead ebbed away, and by the time they reached the infamous righthand turn off the A-road and onto the much more difficult upper slopes of the Galibier, for all Oier Lazkano (Movistar) was still bravely trying to keep clear, it was clear that the winner of the day would come from the bunch.

The first of the big names to get dropped thanks to the collective UAE pressure was Simon Yates (Jayco-AIUIa), fourth in the Tour de France last year, and at that point an outsider for the podium at least. Others like Egan Bernal and Geraint Thomas (Ineos Grenadiers) were long out of the picture, but when Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) looked to be in trouble and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) also started to flounder slightly the damage was impressive. Finally, it was up to Pogačar himself, delaying his acceleration until well into the closing kilometre because of a headwind, he later claimed, although such a late assault on power in the Tour by such a typically impulsive attacker sparked no end of rumours about his underlying condition. Sloping away around the final corners leading to the top of the snow-lined climb, Evenepoel initially responded but Vingegaard was the closest to follow Pogačar - in the second confirmation after San Luca who would be his toughest rival to crack. But crack Vingegaard did, albeit by a handful of seconds at the summit.

With the glorious benefit of hindsight, the way that Pogačar subsequently gained far more time on the descent was perhaps far more significant than it initially seemed. You could see that Vingegaard had had enough pure strength to keep the gap on Pogačar to a relative minimum on the climbs, provided that distance was relatively short. However what the much bigger time loss on the descent arguably demonstrated was he was lacking the endurance capacity that only 12 weeks of full Tour de France preparation can give, and once pushed to his limit by Pogačar, that lack of underlying endurance condition truly made itself felt.

Secondly, there was a real dearth of support for Vingegaard from his team on the Galibier. While Matteo Jorgenson was clearly stretching himself hard and well to help the Dane, he fell foul of the UAE mass climbing, and the absence of a Sepp Kuss or Roglič or Steven Kruijswijk from the 2024 Tour playbook for Visma-Lease A Bike to back Vingegaard on the Galibier was noticeable. Wout van Aert, himself on the recovery trail from a bad crash this March like Vingegaard was nowhere near his monumental 2022 self on the Tour’s mountain stages. Instead after a fruitless chase, Vingegaard eventually had to rely on external support from temporary allies like Evenepoel to limit the gaps. In stark comparison, UAE Team Emirates were operating at their best collective level of any Tour de France, whittling down the lead group to just eight before Pogačar finally attacked. Both individually, and in terms of his squad, then, Pogačar was on a much better footing than the defending Tour champion. And the Galibier was where it showed first.

Until that little-known finish in the Massif Centrale, last visited by the race in 2016, the Tour had been a stalemate with Pogačar narrowly ahead on points, an advantage that left ample room for recollections of the way Vingegaard swept the field in 2023. True, Pogačar had made an impressive attack on the San Luca, only for Vingegaard, the rider from the ‘Big Four’ with the best Tour track record bar the Slovenian himself, to respond. Yes, Pogačar had gained time on the Galibier but rather than being a minute or two, the difference was measured in seconds. He’d beaten Vingegaard in the time trial but by less than 30 seconds. Each time when Vingegaard claimed the damage was far less than he expected, it was hard to fault the Dane, and each time the doubts rose higher around Pogačar’s potential to do the historically ultra-challenging ‘double’.

Stage 11 to Le Lioran, a constantly undulating day of 211 kilometres of racing through remote roads of central France’s main mountain range, was supposed to change that. After the relentless driving by UAE Team Emirates on the cat. 2 Col de Néronne, a further ratcheting up of the pace by Adam Yates and a devastating initial attack by Pogačar on the horrendously difficult ascent to Puy Mary Pas de Peyrol seemed, finally, to have cracked Vingegaard. Compared to the paltry advances at the summit of the Galibier, Pogačar’s rasping acceleration on a day of more than 4,000 metres of climbing gained more than 30 seconds at one point. But then the unthinkable happened, as once over the summit and onto the next climb just a handful of kilometres further on, Pogačar began looking back repeatedly, and visibly hesitated.

The whys and wherefores of his nervous actions and sudden halt to his usual fluid pedalling style have been buried under multiple overlapping interpretations and explanations. They range from his uncertainty about the full race route and the distance to the finish to a lack of information as to who was chasing to a brief (and unresolved) problem with his back wheel, which he mistakenly thought had punctured to a rumoured forgetting to refuel just like in the Col du Granon in 2022. None of these has been fully confirmed by UAE Team Emirates, but whatever the reason, the scenario felt completely bizarre: here was Pogačar alone and ahead of the field - why didn’t he just do what he’d done on multiple occasions, from Strade Bianche to half a dozen occasions in the Giro, and drive home his advantage?

Instead, as Pogačar slowed notably, it was to find that Jonas Vingegaard had bounced off the canvas in style, weaving through the mist to come within reach of Pogačar again well before the summit of the cat.2 climb that followed, Le Pertus. The Slovenian sprinted for the time bonus at the summit of the Pertus, beating Vingegaard, but in a race that was always going to be won by minutes not seconds, scrabbling for such small advantages felt like he was clutching at straws.

And it got worse. After picking their way up the final climb to Le Lioran, Pogačar put up a spirited defence against Vingegaard in the sprint, only to be defeated. Adding up the time bonuses, Vingegaard only closed the gap by one second, but it was a massive psychological blow and one which allowed Vingegaard, as he confirmed after the Tour was over, to think that he had a real chance of winning outright. Even as Le Lioran all but confirmed that the Tour was essentially a two-man duel given Roglič’s difficulties and Evenepoel’s preference to ride conservatively rather than risk his podium, suddenly seemed impossible to choose between Vingegaard and Pogačar as leading favourite.

That would all change yet again, and decisively in Pogačar’s favour, on the two big days in the Pyrenees. But after stage 11 there was no lack of media reports suggesting that Pogačar had overreached, that by the end of the Pyrenees, the jersey would be on Vingegaard’s shoulders, that Le Lioran marked a real turning point and that the momentum was now with the Dane. Many observers thought that the race would not be decided at least until the final Alpine stages or even the last time trial in Nice. How wrong we all were - but how right it felt at the time.

By his own telling – and per most external estimates of his power data – Vingegaard produced arguably the best climbing performance of his career at Plateau de Beille. The problem was that he was competing against a very different Pogačar to the one he defeated so soundly the past two Julys. If Pogačar has soared to startling new levels of performance this summer, then Plateau de Beille was the apotheosis.

Pogačar may effectively have won the Tour at Plateau de Beille, but it took five more days for Vingegaard to concede defeat. After overcoming a punctured lung and multiple fractures just to ride this Tour, Vingegaard was never likely to lay down his arms at that early juncture. As the third week dawned, he and his Visma team clung to their belief in his gifts of endurance and his superiority at high altitude.

Exactly one year earlier, Pogačar’s 2023 Tour challenge had ended on the Col de la Loze, immortalised by the words he pronounced over the radio: “I’m gone, I’m dead.” Visma’s decision to withdraw their radio communication from television broadcasts meant that Vingegaard’s words here remained private. No matter, when the Bonette came and went without a Vingegaard attack, everybody understood the Tour had ended as a contest.

All that remained was for Pogačar to run up the score, even if he insisted that he was not racing to take revenge for his defeats of the previous two years. After soaring clear to win at Isola 2000, he doubled down on the Col de la Couillole a day later, when he tracked Vingegaard’s acceleration and then blasted past him inside the final kilometre. Inevitably, Pogačar added the final time trial in Nice. In the final reckoning, his dominance was total.

Barry Ryan was Head of Features at Cyclingnews. He has covered professional cycling since 2010, reporting from the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and events from Argentina to Japan. His writing has appeared in The Independent, Procycling and Cycling Plus. He is the author of The Ascent: Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and the Rise of Irish Cycling’s Golden Generation, published by Gill Books.