Months of mind games between the two Tour de France favourites had a settlement of sorts on the opening day of the 2026 race, as Jonas Vingegaard gained an immediate 12 seconds advantage over Tadej Pogačar in a 20km team time trial in Barcelona.
Stage one of the 113th edition of Le Tour set the tone for what spectators hope will be another enthralling battle in the ensuing three weeks, and follows what has been a lengthy period of the two setting their stall out in public.
The declarations of superiority have not quite been delivered with the same intensity and ferocity as title-fighting boxers utter them, but nor can the war of words be filed away as chilling ripostes.
But the mind games that both Pogačar, 27, and Vingegaard, 29, have engaged in since the spring have persisted unabated – and have been in stark contrast to previous years when both riders have typically tried to shift the pressure away from themselves.
Pogačar has won four yellow jerseys to date, including the last two, while Vingegaard beat him to the maillot jaune in both 2022 and 2023. Theirs is an eternal rivalry, very possibly the greatest and most gripping of all time.
Yet despite close opening halves of the race, Vingegaard was eventually beaten comfortably by Pogačar in the past two editions, hindered by a life-threatening crash at the Itzulia Basque Country just three months before the 2024 Tour, and still feeling, he claimed, the after-effects of that incident a year on.
Throughout 2026, however, Vingegaard has been declaring himself fully recovered and “better than ever,” repeating that phrase multiple times in the final week of the Giro d’Italia which he won convincingly by more than five minutes; beat Pogačar this July and he’ll become only the ninth man in history to win both the Giro and Tour in the same year.
His Visma-Lease a Bike team have also been singing from the same hymn sheet and have promised a closer fight for yellow between the Vingegaard and Pogačar in this year’s Tour, having made the assessment that there are few punchier stages and not enough time trial kilometres for Pogačar to really make his dominance count. When he twice won the Tour, Vingegaard had the advantage over Pogačar in the high mountains.
Those assertions of confidence from the Vingegaard camp continued on the eve of the race with the Dane saying that he was “both better and stronger. I would even say I’m happier in a mental state”.
Accomplishing the Giro-Tour double has often been referred to as a near-impossible task – recent greats like the now-retired Chris Froome and Alberto Contador didn’t pull it off – but Vingegaard was bullish about his prospects.
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“It is true that I did not have to completely kill myself [to win the Giro],” he said. “I didn’t come out of the Giro completely on my knees. I came out of the Giro in a good way and pretty quickly I could start building towards the Tour de France.”
The slow drumbeat of self-assurance from the usually reserved Vingegaard in recent months has led to a response from Pogačar, an entirely different character and personality, but one who has always been respectful when discussing his closest adversary.
At June’s Tour de Suisse, the Slovenian launched a successful 70km solo attack on day one – an unprecedented move in shorter stage races – to crush the competition from the off. It was, commentators and fellow riders suspected, a message to Vingegaard that he too was in career-best form.
He backed that up with comments he made in the wake of his victory in Switzerland. “On our camp [at altitude in Sierra Nevada, Spain], there’s a climb that I tested on last year. I set a really good time and I told myself, ‘Wow, I will never be able to go faster than that.”
This May he returned to said climb and “was significantly faster than last year. From a training perspective, I would say I’m stronger.”
The psychological warfare continued just before the Tour began with Pogačar – who is aiming for a record-equalling fifth Tour title – attempting to play down Visma’s talk and hype and instead reassert himself as the overwhelming favourite.
“I do not think that he [Vingegaard] is the only one who can come close,” Pogačar said. “I think there are quite a few guys who can aim for the victory [including] the guy next to me.”
He was referring to his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate Isaac Del Toro, who was a stage away from winning the Giro d’Italia in 2025 before a monumental error on the penultimate day paved the way for an epic Simon Yates comeback.
Since then Del Toro, 22, has won the past five stage races he has completed, including the traditional Tour de France warm-up race, the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, in mid-June. Along with the French 19-year-old hope Paul Seixas, the Mexican is regarded as the future of cycling.
Asked what hopes he has for Del Toro this July, Pogačar deadpanned: “That he wins the Tour de France.” In his eyes, his colleague is his closest challenger to the yellow jersey, not Vingegaard.
Where Vingegaard has gone, Pogačar has followed. Two rivals trying to get ahead of one another before a pedal was even turned. The first real blow in Barcelona, however, was landed by Vingegaard.
Photograph by Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP