Question Tour de France: 2023 Vingegaard vs 2025 Pogacar

[Devil's Elbow]

Another way of looking at this is comparing Pogacar 2025 with Vingegaard 2022, which is way easier to do than comparing with Vingegaard 2023 because the way 2022 and 2025 were won is really similar.

2022 - Vingegaard crushes Pogacar on Granon, Pogacar fails to gap Vingegaard all race (bar the cobbles stage) with Vingegaard riding defensively, then Vingegaard crushes Pogacar again on Hautacam
2025 - Pogacar crushes Vingegaard on Hautacam and puts almost as much time into him between the ITT and the MTT, Vingegaard fails to drop Pogacar all race and loses a couple of seconds to a stomp twice with Pogacar riding defensively

So the biggest days are basically a wash. The main differences are:

• Pogacar won three stages in 2022 to Vingegaard's zero in 2025, but a big part of that is due to Pogacar being more explosive which I don't think is more than a secondary factor when assessing dominance in a GC win
• Pogacar won by 4:24 in 2025, whereas Vingegaard won by 2:43 in 2022 - a difference of 101 seconds. However, Vingegaard 'lost' 51 seconds on the final parade in 2022 to finish with his team, those obviously don't matter to this discussion. That leaves us with 50 seconds. Pogacar accumulated 26 more bonus seconds than Vingegaard between the 2022 and 2025 editions, which comes mostly from the difference in stage wins and shouldn't be counted twice. The remaining time gap as it was on the road is a whopping 24 seconds.
• The 2022 Tour was perceived to be much closer than it actually was because Pogacar was such a massive favourite going into the race, and therefore Vingegaard taking more time on Granon than Pogacar took on Hautacam was not seen as decisive whereas the latter certainly was. So you need to deliberately set the way you perceived the races in real time aside to make a fair comparison.

In other words, almost the entire difference between Pogacar 2025 and Vingegaard 2022 consists of Pogacar being more explosive and thereby accumulating more stage wins and bonus seconds. So the difference between those two is not that large at all. Conventional wisdom is that Vingegaard's 2023 win was more dominant than his 2022 win. So to argue that Pogacar was way more dominant in 2025 than Vingegaard was in 2023, you also need to argue at least one and maybe even both of the two below:

• Conventional wisdom is wrong and Vingegaard's 2023 win was less dominant than his 2022 win
• Stage wins are a crucial factor in assessing how dominant someone was in winning a GC (which also requires you to argue that Roglic was somewhat dominant in the 2020 Vuelta even though he won by a hair, because he won 4 out of 18 stages which is his best-ever moyenne in a GT)

 

[VayaVayaVaya]

Vingegaard just said he is only now feeling himself after his crash. So taking Tadej injury into acccount and not Jonas his injury seems unfair. Also Pogacar kept pace early on, on what i believe were on shorter climbs that suited him the most at the time. Once the bigger mountains came he fell out of contention.

I think it is valid to factor that in to 2024, not 2025. Curious that he appeared to perform better in 2024, though. Not what I or any that I am aware of expected. I am hopeful he will contend with Pogacar this year, but I do not see it, barring incident.

 

[Netserk]

Conventional wisdom is wrong and Vingegaard's 2023 win was less dominant than his 2022 win

affirmed

 

[Red Rick]

Another way of looking at this is comparing Pogacar 2025 with Vingegaard 2022, which is way easier to do than comparing with Vingegaard 2023 because the way 2022 and 2025 were won is really similar.

2022 - Vingegaard crushes Pogacar on Granon, Pogacar fails to gap Vingegaard all race (bar the cobbles stage) with Vingegaard riding defensively, then Vingegaard crushes Pogacar again on Hautacam
2025 - Pogacar crushes Vingegaard on Hautacam and puts almost as much time into him between the ITT and the MTT, Vingegaard fails to drop Pogacar all race and loses a couple of seconds to a stomp twice with Pogacar riding defensively

So the biggest days are basically a wash. The main differences are:
- Pogacar won three stages in 2022 to Vingegaard's zero in 2025, but a big part of that is due to Pogacar being more explosive which I don't think is more than a secondary factor when assessing dominance in a GC win
- Pogacar won by 4:24 in 2025, whereas Vingegaard won by 2:43 in 2022 - a difference of 101 seconds. However, Vingegaard 'lost' 51 seconds on the final parade in 2022 to finish with his team, those obviously don't matter to this discussion. That leaves us with 50 seconds. Pogacar accumulated 26 more bonus seconds than Vingegaard between the 2022 and 2025 editions, which comes mostly from the difference in stage wins and shouldn't be counted twice. The remaining time gap as it was on the road is a whopping 24 seconds.
- The 2022 Tour was perceived to be much closer than it actually was because Pogacar was such a massive favourite going into the race, and therefore Vingegaard taking more time on Granon than Pogacar took on Hautacam was not seen as decisive whereas the latter certainly was. So you need to deliberately set the way you perceived the races in real time aside to make a fair comparison.

In other words, almost the entire difference between Pogacar 2025 and Vingegaard 2022 consists of Pogacar being more explosive and thereby accumulating more stage wins and bonus seconds. So the difference between those two is not that large at all. Conventional wisdom is that Vingegaard's 2023 win was more dominant than his 2022 win. So to argue that Pogacar was way more dominant in 2025 than Vingegaard was in 2023, you also need to argue at least one and maybe even both of the two below:

• Conventional wisdom is wrong and Vingegaard's 2023 win was less dominant than his 2022 win
• Stage wins are a crucial factor in assessing how dominant someone was in winning a GC (which also requires you to argue that Roglic was somewhat dominant in the 2020 Vuelta even though he won by a hair, because he won 4 out of 18 stages which is his best-ever moyenne in a GT)

2025 is indeed much more like 2022, and they do indeed get treated so differently because expectations were so different.

For the 2023 comparison, I would simply go with Pogacar being better, but also with Vingegaard being a better opponent in 2025.

 

[Devil's Elbow]

For the 2023 comparison, I would simply go with Pogacar being better, but also with Vingegaard being a better opponent in 2025.

Agree completely, this is exactly what I stated upthread and it's what makes the comparison less clean.

 

[canina82]

2025 was much more like 2022 but in 2025, Pogacar dominated Vingegaard in every terrain. In 2022, before Granon, Pogacar dominated the race in the ITT, cobbles, PDBF after leading the final km and still won. For me, Vingegaard (his ceilling) wasn't better than Pogacar in the mountains. He took a lot of advantage from Pogacar's suboptimal preparation (the race dynamic changed completely after Marie Blanque) because Pogacar put Jonas on the ropes multiple times before cracking due to lack of base level.
In 2022, I think Vingegaard was more dominant than 2023 because I never saw him in real trouble trying to follow Pogacar in the mountains.

 

[KoopaCycling]

I'm not even sure why anyone would take an injury into account. Especially one that does not happen during the race.

At the end of the day the question is not who was more dominant cause the other rider got injured earlier in the season.But simply who won the tour more dominantly.

Pogacar was better throughout 2025 but not to the point he crushed Vingegaard into oblivion. Meanwhile Pogacar needed to completely empty himself to stay in contention, only to get crushed in 2023. So for me the answer who had the more dominant tour win clearly belongs to Jonas. But that's how i view things. If Tadej had a truly awful day even once during the last week of 2025 Vingegaard could still take advantage. That's not the case for tadej in 2023.

Nibali was not the most dominant GT rider of his era. But he had one of the more dominant GT Tour wins.

 

[Brumdog66]

At no point during the race did Vingegaard seem capable of winning. Pogacar seemed like he had a chance until combloux.
More interesting one is 2011 Samuel Sánchez vs 2017 Landa

 

[jotafap]

I'm not even sure why anyone would take an injury into account. Especially one that does not happen during the race.

At the end of the day the question is not who was more dominant cause the other rider got injured earlier in the season.But simply who won the tour more dominantly.

Pogacar was better throughout 2025 but not to the point he crushed Vingegaard into oblivion. Meanwhile Pogacar needed to completely empty himself to stay in contention, only to get crushed in 2023. So for me the answer who had the more dominant tour win clearly belongs to Jonas. But that's how i view things. If Tadej had a truly awful day even once during the last week of 2025 Vingegaard could still take advantage. That's not the case for tadej in 2023.

Nibali was not the most dominant GT rider of his era. But he had one of the more dominant GT Tour wins.

If we were talking about 2022 Jonas vs. 2025 Pogacar, this would be debatable for me. But 2023 Jonas is not even close to being as dominant as 2025 Pogacar. But oh well, "opinions". What I know for a fact is nobody is using Pogacar's injury as an argument to claim Vingegaard’s win was less dominant.

As for the this part of your quote:“If Tadej had a truly awful day even once during the last week of the 2025 Tour, Vingegaard could still take advantage. That's not the case for Tadej in 2023"

Are you serious? What about the day Pogacar collapsed? Let's reverse the roles there, what would have happened? I don't like to play the “what ifs”, but your argument above doesn't make any sense to me. That was clearly the case for Tadej in 2023. He was able to drop Jonas on multiple stages, and was in clear contention until the ITT (10 seconds between both before stage 16, what a dominant Tour) /collapse, unlike Jonas in 2025.

 

[KoopaCycling]

Tadej lost time on Jonas in stage 5, Stage 6 Tadej fought back, but he took a lot less time on Jonas than Jonas did on him on stage 5. Stage 9 , Tadej again only managed to gain a handful of seconds after doing everything he could. Stage 16 Jonas took nearly 2 minutes on Tadej. Stage 17 Tadej collapsed after trying really hard and was done.

Tadej being able to drop Jonas is a bit of an overstatement if were talking about seconds and him destroying himself to gain back the time he lost on Jonas in stage 5.

Meanwhile Tadej was stronger throughout 2025 but did not crack Jonas the way he got cracked. meaning if Tadej had even had 1 bad day he could have still lost that Tour. Jonas was never in danger of losing that Tour after he cracked Tadej. Tadej even wanted to receive help from Jonas to go for a stage win together.

May i remind you that parcours was such that the first 10 days (unless my memory is wrong) was designed without truly hard multiple mountain stages as well.

It basically comes down to Tadej being consistently better in 2025 versus Tadej being able to mask his relative weakness on terrain that suited him only to be exposed once things got truly hard.

 

[AmRacer]

Tadej lost time on Jonas in stage 5, Stage 6 Tadej fought back, but he took a lot less time on Jonas than Jonas did on him on stage 5. Stage 9 , Tadej again only managed to gain a handful of seconds after doing everything he could. Stage 16 Jonas took nearly 2 minutes on Tadej. Stage 17 Tadej collapsed after trying really hard and was done.

Tadej being able to drop Jonas is a bit of an overstatement if were talking about seconds and him destroying himself to gain back the time he lost on Jonas in stage 5.

Meanwhile Tadej was stronger throughout 2025 but did not crack Jonas the way he got cracked. meaning if Tadej had even had 1 bad day he could have still lost that Tour. Jonas was never in danger of losing that Tour after he cracked Tadej. Tadej even wanted to receive help from Jonas to go for a stage win together.

Like I said, none of it matters. Tadej as far more dominant 2024/2025 than Jonas 2022/2023.

 

[KoopaCycling]

Obviously this discussion does not matter. Overall Pogacar has come out on top.
But if we are having this debate about a single tour, i have as many reasons to believe Jonas win was more dominant than you believe Tadej was more dominant.

 

[YavorD]

Obviously this discussion does not matter. Overall Pogacar has come out on top.
But if we are having this debate about a single tour, i have as many reasons to believe Jonas win was more dominant than you believe Tadej was more dominant.

Surely if you dominate every terrain and generally you're stronger than your opponent through the race you are more dominant.

Surely we can argue that stage wise Granon and Combloux are the most dominant performances, but IMO you can't be more dominant if you get dropped numerous times.
.

 

[vappa]

Clearly 2025 Pogacar. Shouldn't even be a question unless you look only at the time gap but that doesn't require a poll

 

[KoopaCycling]

Surely if you dominate every terrain and generally you're stronger than your opponent through the race you are more dominant.

Surely we can argue that stage wise Granon and Combloux are the most dominant performances, but IMO you can't be more dominant if you get dropped numerous times.
.

I disagree. Pogacar was able to mask his weakness till the hard part of the Tour began. He was exposed once things got tough. Had there been an early multiple mountain genuine hard stage, their would have probably been an immediate gap. Kinda like evenepoel in latest uae tour. Who looked good until the tough part began.

Lets say in 1 tour Pogacar is at 100 and Vingegaard at 97 and the gap is visible on every stage
In other Vingegaard is at 100 and Pogacar at 95 but the gap only becomes noticeable when the road gets well and truly hard.

But thats just my take on it. Obviously im a minority. It's not like i can't see all of your viewpoints, and understand why many would feel Pogacar was the more dominant.

 

[YavorD]

But that's not 100% true.. Pogacar showed weakness on stage 5 and that WASN'T a super hard stage. Then Visma went for the kill, totally expecting that they will win the Tour that day. Only that they didn't.
If Pogacar was as weak and Vingegaard as dominant, surely Pogacar would have been dropped on stage 6 as well and wouldn't drop Vingegaard at all that Tour (see 2022 where we can claim Vingegaard was dominant).
Pogacar was very inconsistent in that Tour having a good days and some terrible ones (where he lost a lot of time), that's why the gap was so big.
Don't think Vingegaard was dominant, just much more consistent.
Was Vingegaard's consistency the reason for Pogacar's inconsistency? Maybe.