ANALYSIS: WHO CAN WIN THE TOUR?
We take a look at what makes up the select group of riders who can contend for the maillot jaune
Who’s going to win the Tour de France? Egan Bernal or Primož Roglic, most likely. Maybe Tom Dumoulin or Geraint Thomas. And, beyond that, you’d get good odds on a handful of outsiders: Nairo Quintana, Thibaut Pinot, Emanuel Buchmann and Tadej Pogacar. The shortlist is short; all the more so considering there are 176 starters.
Three weeks might seem a long time to decide who wins if there are fewer than 10 riders with a realistic chance of winning. Does this make cycling unusual? The tennis Grand Slam men’s singles events aren’t so different after all - 128 starters, and the shortlist of real favourites is three or four, depending on the year. Since 2010, 34 of the 41 tournaments have been won by Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer or Rafal Nadal, with only three other players having shared the remaining seven. Conversely, golf majors mostly start with 156 players, and 29 different players have won one in the same time period. These are individual sports, however - cycling’s team dynamic means that only a handful of riders go to a race as a GC leader.
It’s not just in France that there’s a small number of genuine contenders - it’s almost the same with the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España. The Tour may be the jewel in cycling’s crown, and the yellow jersey worth more than any other win, but in the modern era, the prestige of winning a grand tour and the competitiveness of the peloton mean that if it were ever possible to be a little lucky to win one in the past, it certainly isn’t now. To win a grand tour takes vanishingly rare physical resilience and talent, combined with strong teamwork, perfect peaking and the avoidance of bad luck. In the last century, the Giro and Vuelta fields, with a few exceptions, tended towards the parochial, but since the late 1990s and early 2000s, they have evolved into major targets. The very short shortlist of potential winners is largely the same across all three grand tours now.
THE PHYSICAL QUAL I T IES
At the most basic level, the physical capacities of a rider are the qualifying criteria to be a contender, and then circumstances, tactics take care of the rest. EF Pro Cycling manager Jonathan Vaughters explains that it’s far from being a case of the strongest rider always winning.
“Had Chris Froome been on a different team, who weren’t able to keep him at the front via sheer horsepower, if he’d had to manage the first week of the Tour with the crashes and the crosswinds by himself, I don’t think he would necessarily have been a grand tour winner,” he says. “But the fact is, he was on a team that was able to hire the highest horsepower riders in the world so they were always able to essentially physically pull him out of danger.”
At the same time, it helps to have as many high-end physical attributes possible, says Vaughters.
“You have to climb well and you have to time trial well. That’s obvious. Your oxygen carrying capacity against weight and your oxygen carrying capacity versus aerodynamics. You need both of those. Some people are one, and some are the other, and a few people are both.
“But then, on top of that you have to have an extremely great ability to use lipids or fats as fuel. If you’re constantly chewing through carbohydrates as fuel, eventually your body won’t recover. Your hormone levels have to be able to recover quickly. With cellular regeneration, ie muscular
recovery, you have to recover well day after day. And after all that, you have to manage yourself very well in a peloton because grand tours tend to be more dangerous than other races - the rewards are higher, therefore people are willing to take higher risks.”
Vaughters has had riders come close to a grand tour win and one, Bradley Wiggins, went on to win a Tour on a different team. “We’ve had three different riders podium in the Tour - Christian Vande Velde, Brad Wiggins and Rigoberto Urán. Christian and Bradley are somewhat similar in that they have excellent oxygen carrying capacity to aerodynamics, and reasonably good oxygen to body weight. They both had a great ability to recover overnight - that’s almost the strongest point for both of those riders. Then Rigo has unbelievable recovery and unbelievable energy management skills - he is so efficient in a peloton and minimises energy expenditure at all times. But he doesn’t have massive oxygen carrying capacity versus weight or aerodynamics.
“The only one of these three who won a grand tour was Brad, because he is slightly more exceptionally talented than the other two, especially in oxygen carrying and power generation relative to aerodynamics, which is a strong time trial. That one time he could use that skill to get him out of the second-to-fifth-place bracket was because he had a Tour that was very well suited to him. In the top 10 of the Tour, they are all exceptional climbers and time triallists and can recover well. Every one could win a grand tour, but some do and some don’t.”
AGE AND POTENT IAL
In the current WorldTour peloton, there are 11 riders who have won a grand tour (see left). A few of these riders are in the prime of their careers and the obvious answer to the question of who can win the 2020 Tour, Giro and Vuelta is: one of these riders.
It’s probable that of these 11, Alejandro Valverde won’t win another. At 40, his powers are finally waning, and though his resilience and endurance can still net him high placings, he lacks the zing to drop his rivals in the mountains. Froome is the most interesting case of all. He’s won seven, which makes him the most successful grand tour rider since Miguel Indurain, or maybe even Bernard Hinault in the 1980s. But the laborious comeback from the terrible injuries he sustained in his crash in June 2019 will compromise his chances of ever winning another one, and at 35, he would naturally be moving into the end phase of his career by now. At the same time, nobody ever made a successful career in punditry from writing off Chris Froome, and if he can get back to something like his best, he’ll be a contender against the odds. Vincenzo Nibali and Nairo Quintana used to automatically start as top-tier favourites in every grand tour they rode, but neither has won one since 2016 - Nibali’s also 35, while Quintana has had a few mediocre years. However, the Colombian looked revitalised this spring with his new Arkéa team. Lastly, Fabio
Aru won the 2015 Vuelta, but injury and terrible form since then have made him a shadow of his former self. All of these riders may struggle to win another grand tour, for these various different reasons.
Of the other previous winners, Geraint Thomas looks the least likely to win another - at 34 his physical abilities should still just be near their best, but he’s jostling for leadership in a crowded team, and this already cost him the 2019 Tour’s yellow jersey.
The remaining five are likely to start the next few grand tours as out-and-out favourites. Primož Roglic, Egan Bernal, Simon Yates, Tom Dumoulin and Richard Carapaz may only have one win each so far, but they are in their prime and have already demonstrated their ability to win.
“Your oxygen carrying capacity against weight, and your oxygen carrying capacity versus aerodynamics. You need both. Some people are one, some are the other, and a few are both” JOHNATHON VAUGHTERS, EF PROCYLING
But things get more interesting when we try to identify which riders might yet win a grand tour, who haven’t won one yet. There’s no hard and fast rule about development in cycling - some riders build up over years, like Nibali, who progressed from 19th in his debut Giro in 2007, through 11th the next year, 20th then sixth at the Tour, and third at the Giro in 2010 before he finally won the 2010 Vuelta. Others, like Bernal, are in more of a rush - 15th in the 2018 Tour was followed by first.
The most obvious candidates might be those who have come close before. We’ve identified 13 more riders who have finished on the podium of a grand tour, but without having won one (see box). Of these, some are many years away from their best GC result, like Thomas De Gendt and Bauke Mollema. Others, like Urán and Romain Bardet, have achieved multiple podiums and possibly have a few more chances to get everything right. But the most likely in terms of their results, potential and age, are Miguel Ángel López, Enric Mas and Tadej Pogacar. Thibaut Pinot was also not far from putting himself into a position to win the Tour last year. And beyond that, there are many riders to have cracked the top 10 of a grand tour, some of whom have never looked like being a possible winner; others, like Buchmann, look like they are on a trajectory towards a podium at least.
To go back to our comparison with tennis and golf, between 2013 and the 2018 Giro, four riders won 13 of the 16 grand tours that took place - Froome, Nibali, Alberto Contador and Quintana were dominant, and predictable favourites. However, since the 2018 Tour, five different riders have won the five subsequent events. Though the shortlist of favourites does appear to be quite short at first glance, the races are perhaps more open than that.