Who’s #1? Ranking the Top 2024 Tour de France Riders
This is the latest edition of Bicycling’s Power Rankings for the 2024 Men’s Tour de France, where we rank the top contenders leading up to July’s race. This continuously updated list will give you an in-depth look at the riders that have the best shot to stand atop the podium at the end of the Tour—and how they’re performing in the races leading up to July.
These rankings will be constantly refreshed, so you can see who’s up and who’s down on the road to the 2024 Tour de France.
The 2024 Tour de France was expected to bring together the sport’s four best grand tour riders: Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), winner of the last two Tours de France; Slovenia’s Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates), winner of the 2020 and 2021 Tours de France; Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quick Step), winner of the 2022 Vuelta a España; and Slovenia’s Primož Roglič (BORA-hansgrohe), a 3-time winner of the Vuelta and the champion at last year’s Giro d’Italia.
Each rider was taking a different route to the Tour de France, with each choosing to mix race days with extended periods of time spread at training camps. And while some of their paths crossed at certain races throughout the first few months of the season, they weren’t expected to all race together until the Tour.
But that might have gone out the window in early April after a scary, high-speed crash on Stage 4 of Spain’s Tour of the Basque Country took down several riders, including three of the five riders on our first two Power Rankings. And two of them–Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard (Visma–Lease a Bike) and Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Soudal–Quick Step)–suffered serious injuries.
News about each of the three riders has trickled out in the weeks following the crash, and while they’ve all made progress, there are still more questions than answers as to where their form will be by the time the 2024 Tour de France starts in Florence, Italy on Saturday, June 29th.
But there are no questions regarding the rider at the top of our latest Power Rankings.
Tadej Pogačar
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Previous Ranking: 1
Race Days: 12 (and counting)
Race Wins: 8
Best Result: 1st-place, Liège-Bastogne-Liège
Current Race: Giro d’Italia, May 4-26
Pogačar just keeps on winning, and even though he’s racing the Giro d’Italia before this year’s Tour de France (a double-dose of grand tours that usually forces riders to prioritize one race over the other), he’s currently the best-looking rider (form-wise, at least) heading into the Tour this July.
Since our last Power Ranking, Pogačar has spent much of his time training at altitude in Spain’s Sierra Nevada. He raced just once before the start of the Giro d’Italia, winning late-April’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège for the second time in his career after attacking on the steep slopes of the Côte de La Redoute 30K from the finish and riding away from the peloton. No one was close to matching the Slovenian; they were all racing for second.
And it’s been much the same so far at the Giro d’Italia, where Pogačar has jumped out to an early lead after dropping his GC rivals on Stages 1 and 2 to take the maglia rosa as the Giro’s overall leader.
Pog currently leads the race by 45 seconds and will likely add more to his advantage by the end of next weekend with a gravel stage on Thursday, a time trial with an uphill finish on Friday, and another summit finish on Saturday. In fact, don’t be surprised if Pogačar essentially puts the Giro out of reach by the first Rest Day, which would allow him to sit back, ride defensively, and essentially win his first Giro while “training” for the Tour de France.
Once upon a time we thought there would be no way that Pogačar could win the Giro and the Tour de France this season. But the way things are shaping up, we won’t be surprised if he becomes the first rider to win the Giro-Tour double since Italy’s Marco Pantani in 1998.
Primož Roglič
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Previous Ranking: 2
Race Days: 11Race Wins: 1
Best Result: 1st-place, Stage 1 - Tour of the Basque Country
Next Race: Critérium du Dauphiné, June 2-10
Roglič also went down in the crash that took out Vingegaard and Evenepoel, and like the other two, he abandoned the race immediately. But after a series of medical examinations, BORA-hansgrohe reported that the 34-year-old suffered no major injuries.
The Slovenian was initially expected to take part in Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège last month, but the team changed plans, giving him extra time to heal. That was the right call, as the weather in the Belgian Ardennes was atrocious, and the juice wouldn’t have been worth the squeeze. In fact, Roglič probably made more gains by not racing than he would have if he had.
Assuming he’s now fully healed from his injuries, he’s now resumed training for the Tour de France, the only grand tour still missing from his resume. His next race will be the Critérium du Dauphiné in early June, a French week-long stage race that he and several other contenders are expected to use as their dress rehearsal for the Tour de France.
No one wants to see their Tour de France preparation interrupted for any reason, but compared to Vingegaard and Evenepoel, Roglič dodged a huge bullet.
Remco Evenepoel
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Previous Ranking: 3
Race Days: 17
Race Wins: 4
Best Result: 2nd place, General Classification - Paris-Nice
Next Race: Critérium du Dauphiné, June 2-10
Another victim of the crash at the Tour of the Basque Country, Evenepoel broke his right clavicle and scapula in Spain and had surgery a few days later in Belgium to address the broken collarbone.
The injury meant the Belgian would miss a chance to become only the fourth rider to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège three years in a row–and fans would miss their first chance to see the Belgian champion go head-to-head with Pogačar this season.
But we got some good news before Liège-Bastogne-Liège when it was announced that Evenepoel would be attending his team’s altitude camp in Sierra Nevada this month and is back on schedule in terms of his training for this summer’s Tour de France.
That sets him up for an interesting battle with Roglič at the Critérium du Dauphiné, which was always part of the Belgian’s program. If his training goes as well as his team seems to think it will, the Belgian could still head to Florence as one of the Tour’s top-3 contenders.
Egan Bernal
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Previous Ranking: 4
Race Days: 28
Race Wins: 0
Best Result: 3rd place, General Classficiation - Volta Ciclista a Catalunya
Next Race: Tour de France, June 29-July 21
Well, it took a little while, but INEOS finally made the call we’d been expecting them to make: Bernal will race this summer’s Tour de France. It was an easy decision given how well the Colombian has raced this season.
Every time he races, the 27-year-old continues to impress, most recently at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, where–despite never having raced it before–he crossed the line in the elite group of riders that finished behind Pogačar.
And he only ended the day 21st, that belies his overall performance. He was one of only a handful of riders able to stay within shouting distance of the Slovenian on La Redoute and put in a late attack of his own to try and escape the chasing group. After the race, Bernal said he felt stronger than he was before the 2022 crash that almost ended his career.
Then he went right to the Tour of Romandie, where he finished tenth overall while helping his teammate, Spain’s Carlos Rodriguez, win the race overall. He looked like his old self on the climb to Leysin on Stage 6, putting down several attacks to whittle down the leading group and setting Rodriguez up to win the race overall. And had it not been for the Stage 3 time trial (in which he lost about a minute to the other contenders) he might have won the race himself. (Luckily, there’s just one time trial at this year’s Tour de France–and it’s made for climbers.)
Given how much he’s already raced this season, Bernal might not race at all until the Tour, where he’ll join Carlos Rodriguez (fifth at last year’s Tour), Geraint Thomas (currently racing the Giro), and Thomas Pidcock (the team’s next grand contender?) on the starting line in Florence.
Carlos Rodriguez
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Previous Ranking: Under consideration
Race Days: 24
Race Wins: 2
Best Result: 1st-place, General Classification - Tour de Romandie
Next Race: Critérium du Dauphiné, June 2-10
Vingegaard’s drop from the top-5 makes room for Spain’s Rodriguez, who finished fifth in last year’s Tour de France and has been steadily riding his way back to that same level of fitness throughout the first part of the season.
The 23-year-old took his first win of the year on the final stage of the Tour of the Basque Country–on his way to finishing second overall. He then took his first overall victory in a WorldTour stage race at last week’s Tour de Romandie, where he showed himself to have the all-round capabilities (time trialing and climbing) that a rider often needs to win a grand tour.
His next stop will be the Dauphiné, where he’ll face the toughest competition he’s faced so far this season. A strong performance could make him a solid Option 1A at INEOS, and force us to move him over Bernal (who nudges ahead for now since he’s a two-time grand tour champion) in our Power Ranking.
Under Consideration
Unfortuantely, the Tour’s two-time defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) is running out of time to win a third consecutive Tour de France. One of the worst victims of the crash at the Tour of the Basque Country, the Dane lay motionless along the side of the road for a few minutes before finally being placed in an ambulance and taken to a local hospital.
Initial tests revealed a broken collarbone and a few cracked ribs, but later the team shared that Vingegaard also suffered a pulmonary contusion and a collapsed lung. After staying in the hospital for twelve days, he was finally released.
At first, Vingegaard and his team weren’t talking about the Tour de France, rightfully choosing to focus on the health of their star rider. But we got some news Tuesday as Visma-Lease a Bike posted a video to social media, showing Vingegaard on the bike for the first time since he suffered the injury.
Visma-Lease a Bike director Merijn Zeeman told Dutch website Wielerflits.nl that Vingegaard will not be joining the team at its training camp in Sierra Nevada (which started over the weekend) and he will not be racing what was supposed to be his final race before the Tour de France, the Critérium du Dauphiné.
“Winning the Tour will be difficult for Jonas,” Zeeman said, “but it is certainly not impossible." We appreciate Zeeman’s optimism, but with less than eight weeks until the start of the Tour de France, it sounds pretty ominous to us.
Zeeman went on to say, “We have to wait and see, but we certainly still have hope that he can defend his Tour title." That’s an interesting choice of words. Vingegaard could certainly start the Tour in a bid to “defend his Tour title,” but that doesn’t mean he’ll be doing it on his own behalf.
But it could mean that the Dane will start the Tour as a key support rider for American Sepp Kuss, the winner of last year’s Vuelta a España. Kuss hasn’t raced since the Tour of the Basque Country and won’t race again until the Critérium du Dauphiné. He’s been building his season around the Tour de France–as a domestique deluxe to Vingegaard–but now he might get a chance to lead the team himself.
Kuss has raced much this season (he’ll head to the Tour with just 21 race days in his legs). But the 29-year-old has always preferred training over racing and the team has had more than enough time to make whatever (minor) adjustments to his training plan needed to be made to prepare him to be the squad’s Tour de France captain.
And we know now that Kuss will also have Belgium’s Wout van Aert by his side. The Belgian broke his collarbone in the Dwars door Vlaanderen semi-Classic in late-March and missed his own targeted block of races–including what would have been his first Giro d’Italia–due to his injuries. But van Aert is back on his bike and now building toward the Tour de France, which he’ll use to put the finishing touches on his form for the Olympic Games.
So if Vingegaard is healthy enough to start the Tour–and continues to get stronger as the race progresses–Visma could head to the French grand tour with Kuss as their leader and van Aert and Vingegaard as his two most important support riders, a tantalizing prospect for American fans.
We’re also keeping our eyes on Spain’s Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates). Ayuso won the overall title at the Tour of the Basque Country and the time trial in Romandie (where he finished fifth overall). If anything happens to Pog, he’ll be UAE’s team captain at the Tour. He’s not slated to race before the Tour de France, but we won’t be surprised if that changes in the weeks to come.
Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) almost stayed with Pogačar on La Redoute in Liège-Bastogne-Liège and won the mountain stage at the Tour de Romandie. The 30-year-old has podium finishes in all three grand tours (including a victory in the 2019 Giro), and looks to be right on track to challenge for another top-3 finish at the Tour. His next race will be the Tour de Suisse, which wraps-up two weeks before the start of the Tour.
Other riders worth mentioning include Spain’s Enric Mas (Movistar), Great Britain’s Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates) and Tao Geoghegan Hart (Lidl-Trek), and France’s David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ). All four of them raced at Romandie, and while none made major headlines, they all showed that their form is trending in the right direction with 8 weeks left to the Tour. Geoghan Hart and Gaudu will be in action at the Dauphiné, while Mas and Yates–for now at least–won’t be racing until they get to Florence for Stage 1 of the Tour on June 29th.
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