There Are 13 Riders We Can't Wait to Watch at the 2021 Tour de France

While the start list is still being finalized, this year’s Tour de France will see several teams bring multiple captains in an attempt to dethrone the defending champion and overwhelming favorite, Slovenia’s Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates). Given Pogačar’s stellar season so far, that’s a tall order, but there’s more than enough firepower to spoil the 22-year-old’s party.

Here’s a look at some of the key riders to watch in the 2021 Tour de France.

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The reigning Tour de France champion, Tadej Pogačar comes into this year’s race as the overall favorite. And for good reason: the 22-year-old has won almost every race he’s entered so far this season, including the UAE Tour, Tirreno Adriatico, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Like many riders this year, the Slovenian took a break from racing in order to prepare for the Tour, but came back just in time to dominate the Tour of Slovenia.

Seemingly unstoppable, his only weakness might be the fact that he won’t surprise anyone this year. Riding his first Tour de France at only 21-years-old last year, he wasn’t considered a favorite to win the race overall, and thus was given a bit too much freedom during the first half of the race. The competition will do him no such favors this year, but luckily his team has added a few reinforcements to help, including Marc Hirschi, who won a stage last year, and Rafał Majka, a two-time winner of the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition.

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Pogačar’s dramatic win in last year’s Tour—followed by his continued dominance heading into 2021—has perhaps overshadowed the fact that his compatriot, Primož Roglič, had gone into the final weekend of the race wearing the yellow jersey, only to crumble during the Tour’s only individual time trial one day before Paris. He rebounded to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège and his second Tour of Spain later in the fall, but the only way to get over the fact that he was a day away from winning the Tour de France—only to lose it—is to actually go out and win it.

To do it, he’s taken a unique approach, racing minimally and focusing instead on high altitude training camps. In fact, the Tour will be his first race since April 25, an unheard of amount of time considering the Tour’s other top contenders have raced at least one stage race in the weeks leading up to the Tour. If the plan works, Roglič will become the second Slovenian to win the Tour de France. And if it doesn’t, well… there’s always the Tour of Spain.

\INEOS Grenadiers (formerly Team Sky) has won seven of the last nine Tours, an incredible run of dominance. Which makes this next statement even more incredible: They’re bringing their strongest team ever to this year’s race, even while leaving the last rider to have won the Tour for the squad (Egan Bernal) at home. While they’re saying that they haven’t identified a team leader, we suspect the team will be led by 2018 Tour champion Geraint Thomas, 2019 Tour of Italy winner Richard Carapaz, and perhaps, last year’s third-place finisher, Richie Porte.

As of early May, Thomas looked to be the team’s best bet to take the win; the Welshman won the Tour of Romandie, a key race when it comes to gauging the form of several Tour contenders. But then Porte won the Critérium du Dauphiné, a key pre-Tour tune-up event (Thomas finished third), and Carapaz won the Tour de Suisse, another important pre-Tour tune-up event, giving the team three riders who all look capable of winning the race. (And we’re not even mentioning Tao Geoghegan Hart, who won last year’s Tour of Italy and makes his Tour debut for the team this year.)

Ultimately, we expect Porte to take a back-seat to the other two. Signed this past season to serve as a super-domestique, he’s never won a grand tour and we wonder if winning the Dauphiné was the team’s way of guaranteeing his service at the Tour. Instead, the team’s hopes should rest on the shoulders of Thomas—the more talented time trialist—and Carapaz—the better climber. In a race with two time trials and lots of mountains, the team’s ability to manage its complementary captains will possibly be a bigger challenge than overcoming their opposition. The duo’s performance in Stage 5’s time trial will be telling. If Thomas puts minutes into Carapaz, he’ll get the first shot at being the team’s most protected rider.

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Chris Froome’s move to Israel Start-Up Nation was announced last summer, around the same time it was announced that he wouldn’t be riding the Tour de France for INEOS Grenadiers, for whom he won four Tours. But the signing hasn’t seemed to pay off as much as his new team had hoped. Froome looks like a shadow of his former self, and has since been asked to ride in support of one of the team’s other new signings—Canada’s Michael Woods—at the Tour de France.

It’s a smart move all-around: Froome’s looked out-of-shape and overmatched this season, and sending him to face the pressure of leading his team in its first Tour de France would be cruel. Instead Woods, who’s enjoying arguably the best season of his career, will be the team’s protected rider, which allows Froome to continue riding his way back into shape, hopefully in time for August’s Tour of Spain. And Froome’s presence is good for Woods as well, as Froome will still garner much of the team’s spotlight, giving Woods the freedom to focus on scoring a stage win, the King of the Mountains jersey, and perhaps a top-10 finish overall.

Movistar has made a (bad) habit of bringing more than one leader to the Tour de France for years—and it never seems to work. This year they come to the race with last year’s fifth-place finisher, Spain’s Enric Mas, and new signing Miguel Ángel López, who won a mountain stage and finished seventh overall last year—and came over from Astana during the offseason. Mas has to be frustrated; only 26, he was signed to be the team’s grand tour captain for the next few years and delivered a nice result in last year’s race. Now he’s joined by López, a proven grand tour contender who could outshine Mas in the mountains (he and Mas finished first and third in the recent Mont Ventoux Challenge).

Best case scenario: they find a way to work together to win a couple of stages and land one of them on the final podium. Worst case scenario: we get to look forward to a behind-the-scenes look at the team’s implosion on the next season of the Netflix’s docuseries, The Least Expected Day.

Alaphilippe was never expected to be a Tour de France contender, but then the Frenchman wore the yellow jersey for 14 days in 2019, giving it up just two days before the end of the Tour. While a bit of an anomaly relative to other results throughout his career (he’s more suited to single-day Classics), Alaphilippe’s performance has given French fans permission to dream of someone finally ending the host nation’s 35-year Tour drought.

Like many riders, the reigning world champion took a long break from racing following the spring classics. After a long high altitude training camp, he returned at the Tour of Switzerland, where he came into the final stage in third-place overall—only to go home early so that he could be present for the birth of his first child. While we love that he put his family first, we were curious to see how Alaphilippe would have performed in the final stage, a mountainous day that would have given us a good idea as to where he stands heading into the Tour. The Tour’s organizers are certainly rooting for him: Stages 1 and 2 end with short, punchy uphill finishes, the kind of stages that suit Alaphilippe perfectly.

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At 34, Uran’s at the latter end of his time as a grand tour contender. But as he showed at the recent Tour de Suisse, he’s still a threat. Uran won the race’s individual time trial, launching himself up the General Classification to within 17 seconds of race leader Richard Carapaz. And while he ultimately proved unable to unseat the INEOS rider, the message had been sent: don’t overlook this talented veteran. And at least one person got the memo: Jonathan Vaughters, his team’s general manager, announced shortly after the race that the team was going to take “a second look” at its approach to the Tour. While a top-five finish feels more realistic, we wouldn’t be surprised if Uran manages to score the Tour de France podium finish (he finished second in 2017).

Some days we wonder how many Tours Quintana would have won had he not peaked at the height of Team Sky’s dominance. Winner of both the Tour of Italy and the Tour of Spain, the 31-year-old Colombian has twice finished second in the Tour de France, both times behind Chris Froome. Now riding for a French team (he raced for Movistar from 2012 to 2019), Quintana seems more relaxed—and has won some big races—but nothing at the Tour de France (so far). While Quintana himself still believes in his chances to win the race overall, a mountain stage win and a top-five finish would certainly satisfy his team. We’d love to see Quintana make a bid to earn another polka dot jersey as the winner of the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition—he also won it in 2013.

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One of the sport’s biggest single-day superstars, van der Poel is riding his first Tour de France. And while the Dutchman has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t expect to finish (he’s hoping to win a gold medal on his mountain bike at the Olympics), he’s worth keeping an eye on as long as he’s in the race. Case in point: he won two stages in the recent Tour de Suisse before abandoning with a stomach virus, victories that came at the expense of guys like Julian Alaphilippe. We expect to see van der Poel do everything he can to win a stage and perhaps take the yellow jersey on the Tour’s opening weekend. The back-to-back uphill finishes on Stages 1 and 2 remind us of the final climb in March’s Strade Bianche, which van der Poel won with an attack so strong it made Alaphilippe look like he had two flat tires.

Like van der Poel, van Aert is a rider who seems able to win whenever he chooses (unless he chooses to win on the same day that van der Poel does). The Belgian had another terrific spring, winning Ghent-Wevelgem and the Amstel Gold Race and finishing second at Tirreno Adriatico, before taking a break to prepare for the Tour and ultimately, the Olympics. An emergency appendectomy interrupted his plans, however, putting him behind where he had hoped he would be heading into the Tour.

A stage win and the yellow jersey during the first week had been the goal, but van Aert says he’s lowered his sights. But we don’t think he should: assuming he emerges from the opening weekend near the top of the General Classification, he could take the yellow jersey in Stage 5’s time trial. After that, he’ll spend the Tour working for Primož Roglič and perhaps going for the green jersey—if he can do it without harming Roglič’s bid for yellow or his own chances of remaining fresh and ready for Tokyo.

Other Riders to watch: David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ); Guillaume Martin (Cofidis), Wilco Kelderman (BORA-hansgrohe); Jakob Fuglsang (Astana).