The place to watch the Tour de France - LIVE, FREE and EXCLUSIVE - plus the second edition of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is right here on SBS. Replays, mini stage recaps, highlights and live streaming can be found on the and the available for download on and .
Tadej Pogačar v Jonas Vingegaard is a match made in heaven for cycling fans.
It's the unstoppable force of Pogačar, the man with the explosive power to win with impossible displays of acceleration up steep slopes, and the immovable object of Vingegaard. Obviously, he moves quite a lot and quickly at that... the lack of movement is the distance from his front wheel to Pogačar's rear one.
The cut and thrust of the opening two weeks of racing has seen surprise, drama and tension, all stretched over the framework of admiring two superb athletes at the peak of their powers.
Pogačar is the rider who many regard as the best road cyclist in the world, and when it’s all said and done, perhaps one of the best to ever throw a leg over a saddle. Vingegaard doesn’t shine in one-day races, and his breadth of results (23 wins vs 61 wins) are behind his Slovenian rival despite being two years older.
Personality-wise they are different as well, Pogačar is like a happy puppy at times, bounding round post-stage to make sure he congratulates the winner and catch up with friends. The man lives and breathes cycling, the joy he takes in the sport and competing is infectious. There’s a furious poetic rhythm beat out by his pedal strokes, penning a tale of tremendous power in his legs brought to bear through the supple swing of his bike, the smooth rotation of the crank, through the chain to the rear cassette and finally to the road surface.
Vingegaard is the quiet introvert who would be a lot happier if the Tour de France didn’t have any TV cameras or fans, and he could just narrow his focus to the awesome task of getting from point A to B in as quick a time as possible. There’s labour writ large in his pedalling style. Each stamp, each rotation at peak effort is accompanied by a face of woe.
Attacking is like breathing to Pogačar, just as natural as any other regular function, whereas Vingegaard hoards his energy for the moments it will matter the most and otherwise clings doggedly to Pogačar’s wheel. He’s in yellow, it makes sense, and it’s more fun this way round as well.
Pogačar is faster, more explosive, but that doesn’t always make him a winner. Stage 14 was a show in that as his initial attack on the Col de Joux Plane took him clear, but Vingegaard just hung tough 20-30 metres behind, some invisible elastic stretching but never breaking between the pair before they came together again.
The moments where it’s just the two of them are some of the most delicious tension, no teammates to pace, neither willing to cede an inch, and just their bodies, bikes and the road to the finish to decide the winner. Some of these moments have been like track sprints on the velodrome, a near standstill as they look at one another, other times accelerations or feats of endurance at above threshold performance to see who will break first.
The attack into the rear of the motorbike was such a moment of pain for spectators, an anticlimax that robbed the chance to see the finale of that waiting game, and likely playing into the end result of the stage, with Carlos Rodriguez (INEOS Grenadiers) given time to insert himself as the third wheel and profit with a stage win.
Savour it while you can. It’s tempting to think that things remain the same from year to year, but history shows that these narratives don’t last or have things that interrupt the expected flow. Think Chris Froome’s 2019 Dauphine crash that stopped his march to a million Tour de France wins, or Remco Evenepoel getting COVID during the Giro, or Jai Hindley being in the wrong place at the wrong time on a slippery bend, falling and injuring himself and his general classification bid.
Think also of those who said the sport was over due to the rise of superteams and mountain trains that would take cycling into a dull repetition of riding to the numbers. Not that they were wrong to worry, but that things change, a change driven in this case by some superb athletes.
I’ll leave the final word to Pogačar on his rivalry with the only man who’s been able to stop him winning the Tour de France.
“For sure we push each other to improve ourselves and our teams,” said Pogačar of Vingegaard on the rest day.
“I must say, for a third year in a row, now, I’m enjoying this battle. It’s a good duel. I respect this battle a lot.”
