Tour de France 2024 Rider Power Rankings

Previous Ranking: 1

Race Days: 31

Race Wins: 14

Best Result: 1st-place, General Classification - Giro d’Italia

Next Race: Tour de France, June 29-July 21

The winner of back-to-back Tours in 2020 and 2021 (and the runner-up in 2022 and 2023), Pogačar has been training since winning six stages and the General Classification (by almost ten minutes!) at May’s Giro d’Italia. 

He hasn’t raced at all since winning the Italian grand tour, and he doesn’t need to. He’ll start the Tour de France next weekend as the top favorite, and if everything goes as planned, he’ll take his third Tour de France victory and in doing so become the first rider since 1998 to win the Giro and the Tour in the same season. 

The Slovenian has enjoyed a perfect season so far, winning several major races while staying healthy and injury-free along the way. That’s a lot more than his competition can say after a scary, high-speed crash during the Tour of the Basque Country in early-April took down several riders, including all three of the men expected to be his biggest challengers: Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), Slovenia’s Primož Roglič (BORA-hansgrohe), and Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quick Step). All three riders had their Tour preparations interrupted, and two of them–Vingegaard and Evenepoel–suffered serious injuries. 

Pogačar has had no such issues in his own build-up to the Tour; he won the Giro easily, crashing just once (at the end of Stage 2), when his front tire flatted and slipped out in a corner. (He remounted his bike, got a new wheel, and went on to win the stage.) Literally everything that could go right has gone right for the Slovenian. 

To make matters worse for the competition, after last week’s Tour de Suisse, it looks as if Pogačar will be starting the race with the Tour’s strongest team. Great Britain’s Adam Yates and Portugal’s João Almeida put on a Pog-like performance of their own in Switzerland, winning two stages a-piece and finishing first and several overall on the Swiss tour’s General Classification. No one could touch them: the Swiss tour’s third-best rider–Denmark’s Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek), the defending champion–finished almost three minutes behind the UAE duo. 

The thought of Yates–who finished third overall in last year’s Tour –and Almeida pacing Pogačar through the mountains of the Tour de France has to be sending shivers down the spines of teams like Visma-Lease a Bike–who’s been decimated by injuries–and Soudal-Quick Step–who even at full health sits several tiers below UAE in terms of its strength, depth, and experience. 

Of course, anything can happen–and sometimes it does–but we’re hard-pressed to find any knocks against the Slovenian’s chances of winning his third Tour de France this July. 

Previous Ranking: 2

Race Days: 19

Race Wins: 4

Best Result: 1st-place, General Classification - Critérium du Dauphiné

Next Race: Tour de France, June 29-July 21

Roglič has come a long way since crashing out of the Tour of Basque Country–which he was leading at the time. Of the three Tour contenders that went down in the incident, Roglič fared the best in terms of his injuries. But he still played it safe and skipped the rest of the races on his spring program so as to be 100 percent certain that he was healed and ready to begin training for the Tour.

That was clearly the right call, as the 34-year-old won two stages and the General Classification at the Critérium du Dauphiné earlier this month, a race that he and several other Tour contenders were using as their final dress rehearsal before the French grand tour. But the victory wasn’t as crushing as it might have been. 

The Slovenian won back-to-back summit finishes on Stages 6 and 7 and went into the final stage of the race with a leading American Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike) by 1:02. But the INEOS Grenadiers–who were racing to put Spain’s Carlos Rodríguez on the podium–set a vicious pace on the final climb to the finish line on the Plateau des Glières, and with about 5km left to race Roglič cracked.

A dogfight ensued, with Jorgenson doing everything he could to steal the yellow jersey while Roglič did everything within his power to defend it. And defend it he did, by just eight seconds. 

Roglič’s performance at the end of Stage 8 certainly raised some eyebrows, but it’s important to remember that heading into the race the four-time grand tour champion said he was hoping for a stage win and a podium finish, and he far exceeded those expectations. He’s nearing his best form, and getting distanced at the end of Stage 8 proved–he hopes–that he still has room to get even stronger. 

Perhaps more importantly, Roglič’s BORA-hansgrohe team rode a fantastic race, with Russia’s Aleksandr Vlasov and Australia’s Jai Hindley looking like super-domestiques in support of their captain. (Vlasov even finished sixth overall.) BORA seems to be–at the moment at least–one of the the only teams with the depth necessary to go toe-to-toe with UAE, which is enough to put Roglič in a tier of his own, one spot behind Pogačar. 

Previous Ranking: 3

Race Days: 25

Race Wins: 5

Best Result: First Place, Stage 4 - Critérium du Dauphiné

Next Race: Tour de France, June 29-July 21

Another victim of the crash at the Tour of the Basque Country, Evenepoel broke his right clavicle and scapula in Spain and had surgery a few days later in Belgium to address the broken collarbone. The injury meant the Belgian missed a chance to become only the fourth rider to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège three years in a row. 

Like Roglič, the Belgian made his return to racing at the recent Critérium du Dauphiné, and heading into the race he was also clear that his expectations were modest compared to some of the other riders taking the start.

That looked to be a bit of a bluff after Evenepoel crushed everyone on Stage 4’s 34.4km individual time trial, a performance that earned him the yellow jersey as the Dauphiné’s overall leader. But the Belgian champion crashed on Stage 5 (on the same shoulder he injured in April, no less) and was distanced by Roglič and BORA-hansgrohe on the summit finish at the end of Stage 6, so he lost the yellow jersey to the Slovenian. 

But Evenepoel held tough in the mountains and despite falling from first to seventh by the end of the race, there were some encouraging signs for the rider hoping to become the first Belgian to win the Tour de France since 1976. 

First, there was that time trial, where Evenepoel beat Roglič–who’s not bad against the clock himself–by 39 seconds, and Spain’s Carlos Rodríguez (INEOS Grenadiers)–fifth in last year’s Tour–by 1:41. That’s a pretty impressive outcome, but one that shouldn’t surprise us given the fact that Evenepoel is the current world champion in discipline.

But we were more impressed by the way Evenepoel rode in the mountains–especially in the moments after he was dropped by the race’s other GC contenders. The Belgian stayed calm, rode his own race, and managed to limit his losses–and in a couple cases–even regained some of the time he had lost. 

The Tour de France is a long race, and most riders have a bad day at some point. If Evenepoel is able to limit the damage when he’s gapped by other contenders, he can keep his chances for a high GC finish intact.

And of course–as he said before the start of the Dauphiné–Evenepoel has not hit his peak yet. The Dauphiné was just the next step in his progression, and he quickly resumed training to put the finishing touches on his form before heading to Florence for the start of the Tour de France. 

Previous Ranking: 4

Race Days: 32

Race Wins: 3

Best Result: 1st-place, General Classification - Tour de Romandie 

Next Race: Tour de France, June 29-July 21 

A stage winner and top-5 finisher in last year’s Tour de France, Rodríguez hasn’t raced since winning a stage and finishing fourth overall at the Critérium du Dauphiné. But after his teammate, Colombia’s Egan Bernal, finished a distant fourth overall at the Tour de Suisse, we think that Spaniard has locked up the chance to start the Tour de France as the captain of the INEOS Grenadiers.

And he’ll have a stacked team alongside him, with Great Britain’s Geraint Thomas (who won the Tour in 2018 and finished third at the Giro in May) and Thomas Pidcock (sixth at the Tour de Suisse), Belgium’s Laurens de Plus (who had a fantastic Dauphiné and finished one spot behind Rodríguez on GC), and–we assume–Bernal (who’s had a fantastic spring) joining him on the starting line in Florence. 

Watching the new season of Netflix’s Tour de France: Unchained reminded us of something we had forgotten about Rodríguez: he showed in winning Stage 14 that he was the only GC contender unafraid of attacking Vingegaard and Pogačar. One of his teammates even called him a “silent assassin.” 

It’s often said that in order to win big races a rider has to be willing to lose them, and with that kind of “kill or be killed” mentality–and what just might be the second-strongest team in the race supporting him–a Tour de France podium finish is well within Rodríguez’s reach. 

Previous Ranking: 5

Race Days: 14

Race Wins: 7

Best Result: 1st-place, General Classification - Tirreno-Adriatico

Next Race: TBD

With less than a fortnight until the start of the Tour de France, we’re still taking a “no news is good news” approach to Vingegaard’s Tour de France participation. But we’re starting to get a little nervous. 

The Tour’s two-time defending champion looked pretty invincible at the start of the season, winning three of four stages and the overall at the O Gran Camiño stage race in February, and then two stages and the overall at Tirreno-Adriatico in March. In fact, the Dane was so strong that we started to wonder how he could possibly maintain such a high level of fitness all the way through the Tour de France. 

But then came the crash at the Tour of the Basque Country, where Vingegaard was one of the worst victims. He lay motionless along the side of the road for a few minutes before finally being placed in an ambulance and taken to a local hospital, where tests revealed a broken collarbone and a few cracked ribs. Later the team shared that Vingegaard also suffered a pulmonary contusion and a collapsed lung. He stayed in the hospital for twelve days before being allowed to return home.

At first Vingegaard’s Tour de France participation was in doubt–and for good reason–but the news has been nothing but positive over the past few weeks. First, the Tour’s two-time defending champ was spotted riding in full kit on a bike path in Denmark. Then photos emerged from Majorca, where Vingegaard and his family went so that the Dane could train in nicer weather and on more challenging terrain.

The most positive news came a few weeks ago, when it was announced that Vingegaard had resumed his training in full and was heading to an altitude camp at Tignes–in the French Alps–where he would be joining other members of Visma’s Tour de France team. 

The team’s last update said there’s a 50-50 chance that Vingegaard (and Belgium’s Wout van Aert) will ride the Tour de France, and while we were hoping to have more news by the end of the Tour de Suisse, that hasn’t been the case. Vingegaard’s participation will likely be up in the air until a few days before the start of the Tour, at which point the team’s directors will need to submit an official roster to the UCI. 

While frustrating, we’re not surprised by the secrecy surrounding his participation. Visma-Lease a Bike lost two more members of its Tour de France team to a crash at the end of Stage 5 at the Dauphiné, and American Sepp Kuss–one of the team’s other GC options should Vingegaard not start the Tour–abandoned the Dauphiné due to sickness a couple days later. 

Delaying the announcement as long as possible protects whichever rider will be the team’s GC leader (be that Vingegaard or someone else) from facing the intense scrutiny that’s sure to follow the news. It also keeps their rivals guessing–and perhaps a bit uneasy–which gives Visma a slight edge in the mental game leading up to the start of the Tour. 

For our money, we think Vingegaard and van Aert will both start the Tour de France, with Vingegaard doing enough to challenge for a spot on the podium. A third consecutive victory seems a bit much to expect given what we know about his status. Then again, if there were one rider who could come out of nowhere to win the Tour after going through what Vingegaard went through over the past eleven weeks, it’s the Dane.