As I write this, Tadej Pogačar’s odds to win next year’s Tour de France stand at 1/4. The sobering thing about that is it looks about right. It’s not the shortest-ever odds for a Tour win. But that was Pogačar too, ahead of the 2025 race.
The 2026 odds were similarly short, but had drifted out a fraction after the Giro d’Italia, where Jonas Vingegaard looked like Pogačar normally looks at the Tour. But I suspect that Vingegaard only looks like Pogačar when the actual Pogačar isn’t available for direct comparison.
For some reason, this overwhelming domination seems to be getting people down. “It’s going to be so predictable,” they say. Or, “It is wrong that every time I see his cheerful little face I want bad things to happen to him?” (A random sample from two of my friends, one of whom is a pro bike rider.)
If that’s the way you feel, I have a few suggestions that may help.
Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine.
It’s worth contemplating for a moment just how good Pogačar is. Pro riders are very good at what they do. Cycling is a demanding, dangerous, random sport. Everyone, absolutely everyone, who makes any sort of a career as pro is talented, deeply committed, and very lucky. If you’ve ever tried to go toe-to-toe with a WorldTour rider, you’ll know how good they are.
And Pogačar can do to them what they can do to us. He can make them feel just as defeated, inadequate, and disappointed. There’s something pleasingly democratic about that.
It would also, I think, be fair to say that before a lot of Tours, perhaps even most Tours, we’ve heard the same story. There is often an overwhelming favourite because the Tour has always had eras of repeat winners. And at least Pogačar is a slightly interesting favourite.
He puts his reputation and his safety on the line at the classics. He rides with the panache that we all said we wanted – he attacks wildly early, or he falls off and bounces up again to win with a bloodied jersey.
He even has cute little tufts of hair sticking through his helmet vents. If you’d been offered the chance to design your ideal Tour winner during the Sky winning-by-numbers era, you’d have designed Pog. But now we have him? Bit boring, isn’t it?
If you think a Pogačar Tour lacks edge-of-seat moments, let me take you back even further than Sky, to the first Tours I watched in the 1990s, when Miguel Indurain crushed the little people in the (long, long) time trials and simply rode tempo up the climbs. Other than Chris Boardman’s win in the prologue, you could use tapes of the 1994 Tour as a general anaesthetic.
Most important of all, the thing about cycling as a spectator experience is contrast. It’s not pure excitement. It’s not scripted to be entertainment from flag to line. For the most part we’ve resisted the temptation to dick about with the rules to create artificial drama.
So, remember that someday Pogačar will fail. I don’t necessarily mean that as something to celebrate, per se. But when it comes, look at it this way; it’s as if every time he wins and you go, “Uh. Same old,” you ratchet a little more tension into a spring.
When one day someone rides away and leaves him gasping on an Alpine pass, all of that pent-up energy will come tumbling out. For years afterwards we’ll ask each other, “Where were you when Pogačar finally cracked?” It will define the 2020s. (Or maybe the 2030s. Or 2040s.)
And anyway, if the overwhelming favourite wasn’t Pogačar, it would be Jonas Vingegaard, and we’d be saying all the same things about him. There’s always a favourite, it’s always going to be boring, right up to the day it suddenly isn’t.
