Tadej Pogacar seeks record-equalling fifth Tour de France title as Jonas Vingegaard and Paul Seixas challenge

BARCELONA – Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar will chase a record-equalling fifth Tour de France title when the 2026 edition begins in Barcelona, Spain, on July 4, with Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard and France’s Paul Seixas poised to provide the stiffest competition.

Pogacar, who has won the last two editions, aims to join greats Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Eddy Merckx on five Tour victories.

The 27-year-old has never competed less than this season before entering the Tour, in which he will take part for the seventh time.

He has a total of 13 stage or general classification wins in 16 days of racing, including a maiden Milan-San Remo title, a third Tour of Flanders, a fourth Liege-Bastogne-Liege and Strade Bianche and, more recently, the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Suisse.

“The Tour de France is always the biggest challenge of the season and also the race that motivates us the most,” Pogacar said.

“Every year, you arrive at the start knowing that anything can happen over three weeks, and that’s what makes it so special.

“I feel good, I’m looking forward to racing, and I know I’ll have a fantastic group of teammates and staff around me.”

The world road race champion, who admitted struggling with knee issues during the 2025 race and considered withdrawing, will be supported by a formidable UAE Team Emirates XRG outfit.

His teammates include Mexico’s 22-year-old Isaac del Toro, winner of the recent Tour Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes, and Britain’s Adam Yates, a third-place finisher in 2023.

Pogacar’s main rival will once again be Vingegaard.

The Dane seems close to the form that allowed him to win the world’s most prestigious cycling race in 2022 and 2023.

The Visma-Lease a Bike rider has won all three of his 2026 outings – Paris-Nice, the Volta a Catalunya, and the Giro d’Italia, where he claimed five stage wins.

Vingegaard will try to imitate Pogacar, who in 2024 became the eighth and latest rider to achieve the Giro-Tour double.

“That gave me a tremendous amount of confidence heading into the Tour de France,” the 29-year-old said.

“It gave us a huge boost and reinforced the feeling that we can win the Tour.

“A third Tour victory would be a dream come true. It has been three years since I last won the Tour, and ever since then, it has remained one of my biggest goals.”

The Visma-Lease a Bike squad, however, suffered a blow when Belgium’s Wout van Aert, winner of 10 Tour stages, was ruled out with an elbow injury.

France’s newest cycling hope, Seixas, could turn the race for the Yellow Jersey into a three-horse affair.

The 19-year-old prodigy makes his Tour debut, giving France its biggest hope in a generation of a first home champion since Hinault in 1985.

Seixas made a dazzling start to 2026, winning the Tour of the Basque Country and La Fleche Wallonne in April before being beaten only by Pogacar in the Liege-Bastogne-Liege.

However, he had to quit the Tour Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes in early June after crashing heavily.

Seixas said he had been able to resume almost-normal training for the Tour de France.

But he added: “I’m not setting a more specific goal because I’m heading into the unknown – I’ve never competed in a race this long and demanding before.

“This is the race I’ve always dreamed of, and I realise how lucky I am to be able to compete in it so early in my career.”

If he can last three weeks, the Decathlon CMA CGM rider could challenge for a podium finish, along with Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe teammates Remco Evenepoel of Belgium and Florian Lipowitz of Germany, who respectively finished third in 2024 and 2025.

“The Tour is no longer won by an exceptional rider alone, but by an exceptional team,” says Zak Dempster, chief of sports at Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe.

The Tour’s 3,320.7km route features 53,950 metres of climbing across 21 stages.

In other news, four-time Tour champion Chris Froome has retired from professional cycling, bringing the curtain down on a glittering career spanning over two decades in the sport.

The 41-year-old Briton has not raced since sustaining life-threatening injuries in a training crash in France in August 2025.

“Unfortunately, there was that fall last summer,” Froome told The Athletic.

“That wasn’t the way I wanted it to end. But even then, I knew it was over.”

Asked if his career was over, Froome confirmed, “Yes.” REUTERS