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Poll: Who will win the 2023 Tour de France?

Who will win the 2023 Tour de France?


  • Total voters
    133
  • Poll closed .
It's pretty simple this Tour - Pogacar should take 20-30 more bonus seconds than Vingegaard and they should be close in the TT, so if Vingegaard properly drops Pogacar more often than the other way round, he wins, and if not, Pogacar wins. I think option A is a little likelier, especially if it's hot. Everyone else will be a distraction if they're better than expected, and an irrelevance if they aren't (barring DNFs for both of the big two).

Right now, for me that comes to approximately 55% Vingegaard, 40% Pogacar, 5% someone else. That's basically still a tossup.
 
Pogi's invincible status was tweaked by last year's loss to Jonas and his more recent crash at LBL with subsequent loss of training time. This makes him a slight underdog to Jonas this year, and it probably wins him some extra fans who like to cheer for an underdog. I think Pog bounces back strongly in this year's edition. But there are several other excellent all-rounders competing, so hopefully this year's TDF will approach last year's race in levels of excitement.
 
Gaudu or a Frenchman will get lucky and win because of some "chute" and then the French wont be able to really boast about it coz there will be an * next to the winner. It would still be a good race inspite of the "chute" and some dnf.
 
There has rarely been a Tour where two favorites were so far above the rest. Almost certainly one of these two will win. However it's a cycling law that highly anticipated duels never happen. So one of them will crash out, test COVID positive or have some other kind of bad luck; and the other one will win. I'll make a comparison anyway.

Vingegaard has the strongest team, had a perfect preparation, and last year he was the strongest on the long, high climbs. However I think there are only one or two climbs where he might drop Pogacar this year: the Col de la Loze and perhaps the Joux-Plane. In the middle mountains he's less likely to gain time.

Pogacar's preparation was hampered by the broken wrist. He couldn't do any climbing for six weeks. He handled the problem as well as possible by doing a lot of climbing training in the last three weeks. If he's reached top shape he has a chance to win the Tour again, because the course suits him well. Those stages in the Massif Central, the Jura and the Vosges have short, steep climbs where a master of the climbing classics has chances to attack. In Paris-Nice he looked strong and confident on comparable climbs.

Conclusion: Without bad luck or an off day in the Alps I'm giving the edge to Pogacar (but I'm not sure).
 
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I think Pogacar will win this time.
Biggest wildcard for the race is probably Simon Yates, no idea what to expect from him after a long break. He's either gonna fly right out of the gate or fail spectacular. We're talking about Simon Yates, so both things might happen during the same race, I can see him beating the beast on one mountain stage only to loose 20min on the next one.
 
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I think Pogacar will win this time.
Biggest wildcard for the race is probably Simon Yates, no idea what to expect from him after a long break. He's either gonna fly right out of the gate or fail spectacular. We're talking about Simon Yates, so both things might happen during the same race, I can see him beating the beast on one mountain stage only to loose 20min on the next one.

I hope that Yates can get through unscathed and do his best GC - In his last four GT's he's got COVID twice and was crashed into another time - If he rides a good GC, then he is unlikely to win a stgae.