The men’s Tour de France, the most prestigious cycling race in the world, will begin on Saturday 29 June in Florence: it will be the one hundred and eleventh edition and will end on Sunday 21 July in Nice and not, as per tradition, in Paris, where the Olympics will begin the following week. In recent decades it has become quite common for major cycling stage races such as the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia to start in another country, but it has never happened before that the Tour started in Italy. This year, however, four stages will take place, the first from Florence to Rimini, the second from Cesenatico to Bologna and the third from Piacenza to Turin. The fourth will start from Pinerolo, in the metropolitan city of Turin, but will arrive in France, in Valloire, a small village at 1,430 meters: it will be the first mountain stage and will also pass by the famous Col du Galibier.
A brief guide on the stages not to be missed and those that can also be skipped
The Tour is always the most anticipated and followed race, but this year it will be even more so because all the best cyclists in the world are participating such as Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel, Primož Roglič, Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert. These days more or less all enthusiasts and experts are wondering if the Slovenian Tadej Pogačar will be able to win the Tour de France after winning the Giro d’Italia last month, something really difficult to do and which hasn’t happened since 1998, when Marco Pantani did it.
Pogačar is 25 years old, has already won the Tour de France twice and dominated the last Giro d’Italia, winning six stages and arriving at the end with almost ten minutes of advantage over the second place. He is probably the best cyclist in the world, as he is very strong in both stage races and one-day races (he has already won three of the five so-called monument classics, the main races that are run in a single day); without a doubt, he is one of the most exciting for the public, because he tries to win every race he runs, even when it would perhaps be reasonable to hold back. In addition to being in excellent shape, Pogačar will also have very strong teammates who will ride for him and help him in his attempt to complete the Giro-Tour double: João Almeida, Adam Yates, Juan Ayuso are all cyclists who in other teams would compete for the general classification themselves.
In the last two years, however, Pogačar has finished second in the Tour de France because he was beaten by the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, an equally exceptional climber and time trialist, who last year won the Tour with more than seven minutes of advantage over the Slovenian and more than ten over the third-placed Adam Yates, also thanks to the great work of his team, Team Visma-Lease a Bike (formerly Jumbo Visma). Since 2021, the comparison between Pogačar and Vingegaard has made the Tour de France a very spectacular and competitive race, in which other cyclists have struggled to match their level.
However, there are several doubts about Jonas Vingegaard’s chances of being competitive for the final victory in this Tour, because last April 4 he fell in a stage of the Tour of the Basque Country, breaking his collarbone, several ribs and puncturing a lung. After remaining in hospital for several days, he resumed training and decided to participate in the Tour: it is difficult to say in what condition he will arrive, given that he has no longer raced an official race after the Tour of the Basque Country, but he certainly will not be in the best shape to tackle a long and expensive race like the Tour de France, in which cyclists will pedal 3,492 kilometers in three weeks, many of which are uphill between the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Massif Central.
Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard in 2023, in one of the many stages of the last Tour de France in which they left all the other cyclists behind (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
Team Visma-Lease a Bike will not have the American Sepp Kuss due to Covid-19, an excellent climber (i.e. a cyclist who is strong on climbs) who in past stage races has often been fundamental for the team and for Vingegaard. Given his absence and Vingegaard’s uncertain conditions, it will be interesting to follow the race of another American on the team, namely Matteo Jorgenson, who is starting to make himself noticed this year: he won Paris-Nice, a week-long stage race, and came in second in the recent Critérium du Dauphiné, another week-long stage race held in France just before the Tour de France, for which it is often considered a sort of dress rehearsal.
Slovenian Primož Roglič won the Tour of Dauphiné. Roglič is a very complete rider, he has won the Vuelta a España three times and the 2023 Giro d’Italia, but he has not yet managed to win the Tour de France: he came close in 2020, when he was first until the last stage , an uphill time trial in which he was overtaken by Pogačar, who won his first Tour. In the last two years Roglič essentially acted as Vingegaard’s wingman, that is, he helped him win, because he too was racing with Visma. At 34 years old, after almost ten seasons, he decided to change and move to the German Bora-Hansgrohe (which recently made an agreement with Red Bull), to be the only team leader and try perhaps for the last aiming to win the Tour de France.
There is a fourth cyclist who is considered competitive for the general classification, albeit with fewer chances than Pogačar, Vingegaard and even Roglič: the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, 24 years old. Evenepoel has already achieved important results, such as victory in the 2022 Vuelta a España, two editions of the Liège-Bastgone-Liège and two World Championships (the road one in 2022 and the time trial one in 2023). Yet for the moment he has not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate that he is up to par with the best in the most important stage races, because he had to withdraw due to physical problems both times in which he raced the Giro d’Italia, while this will be the his first Tour de France. Furthermore, he too fell together with Vingegaard on 4 April at the Tour of the Basque Country, with less serious consequences but which still affected his preparation.
In addition to the four favorites for the overall victory at the 2024 Tour de France, there will be the Ineos Grenadiers, a very strong and complete team as always that until a few years ago won almost all the stage races. And there will be many other riders who will probably put on a show, starting with the Belgian Wout van Aert and the Dutchman Mathieu van der Poel, two cyclists not capable of competing for the general classification of a grand tour, but capable of doing practically everything else. They have won races in sprints, on climbs, after long breakaways, and their rivalry has often spilled over into a different discipline like cyclocross, which is raced entirely on dirt (they have won nine world titles in cyclocross between the two of them). Both will try to win stages in this Tour.
Even as regards sprinters, i.e. riders who aspire to win races with sprint finishes, some of the best in the world will participate in the Tour: Jasper Philipsen, Arnaud De Lie, Dylan Groenewegen and also the 39-year-old Mark Cavendish, who had decided to retired two years ago but then came back to try to win another stage at the Tour de France and become the cyclist who has won the most (34 so far, the same as Eddy Merckx). Cavendish and the other sprinters will have around seven, eight stages out of twenty-one in total to try to win a sprint, barring any breakaway riders. There will then be two time trial stages, one which will cover several dirt sections and many difficult and legendary climbs such as the Col du Tourmalet and the Plateau de Beille.
2024-06-28 09:45:30
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