Tour de France fever There is that long-awaited summer! The beautiful days are just around the corner and relaxing and strenuous bike rides will be ramped up sensitively in the coming weeks. With the Tour de France, the Olympic Games in Paris and, for the soccer fans, the European Football Championship in Germany, it will be a busy sports summer. In this issue we put the Tour de France in the spotlight and so we immediately take the opportunity to transform this usual foreword into a preview of the Tour de France 2024. Clash of titans When the 2024 Tour de France was announced, everyone immediately had their mouths full about the huge battle that was to come between the phenomena of Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič. However, the latter three went down heavily at the Tour of the Basque Country and saw their planned preparation fall seriously into the water right away. They were rehabbing while Pogačar rode the stars of heaven in Liège-Bastogne-Liège and afterwards took the Giro d’Italia in Merckxian fashion, even seeming to ride with the handbrake on. It was as if he rode everyone home in saving/training mode and it gives the impression that this Giro did not wear him out at all, on the contrary, it even made him a lot better. Immediately then comes the question of who is doing what to him? But is that question appropriate? Isn’t it a little too short? After all, we are talking about the Yellow Jersey in the Tour de France, the most hotly contested race of the year, in which every edition, always something we don’t expect, happens anyway. The battle for the jersey in question will be hard fought and very different than in the Giro d’Italia where the compe- tition - with all due respect to Pogačar’s performance - was rather poor anyway. We weigh the chances of the favorites for the overall victory. Two top favorites, three real challengers Tadej Pogačar The Slovenian lost the last two editions to Dane Jonas Vingegaard. So actually Tadej Pogačar should be second in the favorites pecking order. However, anyone who has seen him throughout the season and especially in the Giro knows enough, he is better than the two previous years. Moreover, his team is also stronger than ever. Or what about a team with Tadej Pogačar, Juan Ayuso, Joao Almeida, Adam Yates, Pavel Sivakov, Marc Soler, Nils Politt and Tim Wellens? We therefore place Pogacar as favorite number 1. Jonas Vingegaard If you had asked us in late March who the top favorite was for this Tour, we would have put Vingegaard at the top spot. Like his entire team at the beginning of the season, he seemed to be even stronger than he was in 2023. Vingegaard’s season started strong again when he dominated the Spanish stage race Gran Camiño from start to finish in late February, winning three of the four stages and the overall classification as he did in 2023. Also in the Tirreno-Adriatico, he showed his wonder legs by winning the fifth stage with a solo attack. The Dane rode away at 29 kilometers from the finish on the steepest part of the San Giacamo. He won the stage by more than a minute’s lead. Later, he also won the stage to Monte Petrano making the Italian stage race, won by 1’24” lead. When American Matteo Jorgenson, beat Remco Evenepoel in Paris-Nice and his team also monopolized the first one-day races, we even thought they were stronger in width than the year before as well. Until the riders of Visma - Lease a Bike suddenly started cycling from one setback to another and also Vingegaard did a huge crash with serious consequences in the Tour of the Basque Country. At the moment - May 30 - it looks like the rehabilitations of both Vingegaard and Wout van Aert are going well and the chances that we will see both in good form at the start of the Tour have become reasonably high. But ‘good form’ is already not enough against a ‘super Pogi’. Can Jonas still find his alien Tour legs in time? We hope so! Remco Evenepoel It will be the first Tour experience for Remco Evenepoel, who will have a Soudal-Quick Step team behind him that is slightly stronger in the tour work than in 2023. But where will Remco stand after his fall in the Basque Country? And how far would he have stood in relation to the two top favorites without that fall? In fact, we have very little to go on about Evenepoel’s real qualities as a grand tour rider and certainly not as a Tour de France rider. The time trials in this Tour are obviously in his favor. Question mark becomes how he handles the tough mountain stages. We see Remco fighting for third place on the podium in Paris. Primož Roglič Primož Roglič, who swapped his Jumbo-Visma cycling jersey for a BORA-hansgrohe outfit this year, had yet to charm us at the beginning of the season. When he too went down with it in the mega-crash in the Basque Country, the question marks only increased. Will he really be an important challenger to the two big favorites? In any case, we place him well away from Tadej and Jonas and think he will compete with Remco for the podium. But the experienced and wily fox that is Primož could also surprise us tremendously. Let’s not forget that in the Basque Country he came out of the crash as the least battered favorite. Perhaps he is the best prepared rider of all and, above all, he and BORA-hansgrohe are spraying a lot of fog and throwing sand in our eyes. We may not see it then, until all the fog has lifted and the sand has been washed out of our eyes.... Outsider Egan Bernal Bernal’s story is well enough known and no one ever expected him to be counted among the favorites again after his near fatal accident. We certainly don’t count him as a real favorite yet, but Egan showed some nice things early in the season and we hope that progression has continued in recent months. Bernal, with his attacking style of racing, could well be a determining factor in terms of the overall victory. Whoever gets him on his side could benefit! It would be nice to see him in the top five at the end of the Tour. Let’s all especially enjoy the exceptional generation of riders we will see at work!.... And with a little bit of chauvinism, we hope it will be Remco who will surprise the most and put Belgium back on the Tour map... Enjoy reading this Touredition of Cyclelive Magazine! Patrick van Gansen

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