Tour de France 2025 preview: Pogačar vs Vingegaard and four more essential talking points 

Pogačar vs Vingegaard

Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali… some of the best rivalries in sport have been a clash of styles, cultures and temperaments.

Rocky IV was the best in the franchise because our flawed hero was pitted against an indomitable Russian, Ivan Drago, who’d seemingly been built in a lab.

And so it is with the latest, possibly greatest, Tour de France rivalry, between Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard.

Barely a minute separates the two best Grand Tour riders of their generation across the past four Tours de France and some 320 hours of racing.

That hair’s breadth gap is all the more remarkable given their starkly different methods.

One, Pogačar, races all-year round, in the style of Merckx or Hinault, on all terrain, with a stated career goal of winning as many different races as possible.

The other, Vingegaard, is from the Froome mould, honing form in carefully calibrated training camps and emerging only occasionally for strategic week-long stage races.

Of the five French showdowns so far, this is easily the most eagerly awaited.

A sprint showdown for the ages

Mark Cavendish may have bowed out of the Tour after 18 (often brilliant) years, but the calibre of sprint talent is as high as it has been in years.

And for the first time since the 2020 start in Nice, the opening stage is designed for one of the fast men to don the yellow jersey.

None of the top four sprinters from 2024 – Jasper Philipsen, Tim Merlier, Jonathan Milan and Biniam Girmay – have ever worn the maillot jaune.

Milan (Lidl-Trek) has never even ridden the race, yet could well be the favourite for stage 1 in Lille after an excellent 2025 campaign to date.

At 6ft 4in (193cm) and with a peak power close to 2,000 watts, what the 24-year-old Italian lacks in experience he makes up for in brute strength.

His challengers have different experiences and talents.

Eritrean all-rounder Girmay soared to the green jersey in Paris last year, his three stage wins demonstrating his broad basket of skills.

Of active riders, only Wout van Aert (9) and Tadej Pogačar (17) have as many Tour stage wins as 27-year-old Philipsen (9).

Belgian Merlier hasn’t ridden the race since his successful 2021 debut, but has had a brilliant season to date. It’s a race that all four could call themselves favourite to win.

Free-to-air coverage disappears in the UK

While Thomas, Cavendish and co led a shift in the fortunes of professional cycling in Britain, they leave it at a worrying time.

As has been well-documented, 2025 will be the last time for the foreseeable future that the Tour de France will be broadcast live on free-to-air television in the UK.

ITV, the long-time rights holder, will cease its coverage upon the completion of the 2025 race, with the sole avenue for watching live coverage then being TNT Sports, where a subscription to a range of sports including cycling costs up to £30.99 a month.

It’s a bitter blow for the sport’s health here. In the short term, fully paid-up members of planet pro cycling will continue to seek it out and stump up the costs.

However, in the long term, the conversion of the casual fan stumbling across the coverage on ITV4 will take a major hit, much like Test cricket did after Sky Sports bought the rights in 2005.

With a petition failing to persuade the UK government to put the Tour on its ‘category A’ sporting events list, which would mean it had to be free-to-air, is cycling about to head back into the shadows in Britain?

One last loop of France for Geraint Thomas

For a rider who rode almost the entirety of a Tour de France (2013) with a broken pelvis, you’d forgive Geraint Thomas one last Tour de France as something of a victory lap.

While the 39-year-old, who won the race in 2018, isn’t entering with designs on a yellow jersey – he’s leaving that to the younger lads – there’s no danger of the Welshman taking his eye off the ball.

This is a man who has spent the last 19 seasons as a pro fixating on a target, then hitting it (or getting very close, at least).

So, when he says he’s still got the hunger for it and he’ll be there in the final week, as he told the Guardian in May, we believe it.

His departure from the scene at the end of this season – following the end of the Tour of Britain, which finishes in his hometown of Cardiff – will be the end of an era for British cycling.

He’s the last of the generation that put the sport on the map in this country.

Why was Tour de France: Unchained axed?

Another last in 2025 is the broadcast of the third and final season of Tour de France: Unchained, the Netflix docuseries that focuses on the previous edition of the race.

When it launched to great fanfare and high hopes in 2023, organisers of the Tour de France hoped it would do for the race (and cycling?) what Drive to Survive did for Formula 1, and open the floodgates of an untapped audience.

Why was it cancelled after only three seasons? Ultimately, the show didn’t get the viewing figures that Netflix requires, when compared against its budget – particularly in France, according to Le Parisien, and this was a Netflix France production, after all.

Why, then, didn’t it get the viewers? Perhaps trying to bottle the lightning of Drive to Survive, which covers an easy-to-follow single season of F1, is impossible to transplant to a sport such as cycling where, while the Tour de France is the biggest race of the season, it’s one of hundreds that run throughout the year.