A few weeks ago, Jonas Vingegaard and Paul Seixas were lighting up the cycling world and making fans dream of an epic Tour de France battle to come – and then Tadej Pogacar reminded everyone who is the boss.
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Vingegaard has been in the form of his life this year, taking part in three stage races and winning them all convincingly.
French prodigy Seixas has been sensational all year, performing at a level never seen before by a teenager.
But then Pogacar, 27, turned up at the Tour of Switzerland and crushed the opposition – which included former Giro d'Italia winner Richard Carapaz – over five days in such emphatic fashion that he might also have killed off the faint hopes of his few genuine Tour de France challengers.
He then spoke about his form in training compared to last year – when he won the Tour, the world and European titles, and three Monument classics: "I'd say I'm stronger".
From a man who had just won the five-day Tour of Switzerland by six-and-a-half minutes, that was a shuddering thought.
He was talking about an altitude training camp in Sierra Nevada where he said he was "significantly faster" on a climb than he had been last year when he set "a really good time" which he thought he could not beat.
But the Slovenian has been in astonishing form this year. In five one-day classics and two stage races, he was won all but one – when he was pipped in a sprint finish at Paris-Roubaix by Wout van Aert.
He has 13 victories in 16 race days this year.
By comparison, Vingegaard has 12 from 36 and Seixas seven from 23.
Of the seven races Pogacar has competed in this year, he has won six and finished second in the other one.
In his two stage races combined, he won seven of the 11 stages and did not finish a single one lower than 12th.
TWO AGAINST ONE
It is no surprise that he feels stronger than ever – at World Tour level, he already has more victories this season than he had throughout five of the previous seven years.
This season, he has picked up more world ranking points on his own than all the other teams except for Red Bull-Bora Hansgroher of Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, Vingegaard's Visma-Lease a Bike and Seixas's Decathlon CMA CGM.
He has scored more than half of UAE Team Emirates' points, despite his own teammate, Isaac del Toro, being third in the individual list.
Del Toro will be working for Pogacar at the Tour as something of a 'super-domestique' – meaning that the reigning champion will have the season's third-best rider helping him.
It hardly seems fair to Vingegaard – a case of two against one where one of the two is probably the greatest cyclist anyway.
Even though Vingegaard has won a Grand Tour this year, Pogacar is still 2 500 points ahead of the Dane in the UCI rankings.
He could well be on his way to his greatest season ever.
But the same could be said of Vingegaard, who is the only man in the race to have beaten Pogacar at the Tour, triumphing in 2022 and 2023.
The Dane crashed badly in 2024 at the Tour of the Basque Country and was a shadow of his former self for the better part of the next 18 months.
But Vingegaard's 12 World Tour level victories this season already beats his previous best in 2023 when he won the Tour de France for the second time and then also finished second at the Vuelta a España.
"I feel that I'm an even stronger version than I was back then," the 29-year-old said recently.
This season, Vingegaard has won the Giro, Paris-Nice and the Tour of Catalonia for the first time, and almost as convincingly as Pogacar won in Switzerland.
In July, fans may be treated to the best ever version of Pogacar against prime Vingegaard.
But can Vingegaard's best match a Pogacar at the top of his game?
Only time will tell.
And then there is Seixas. He will be a great unknown at the Tour, riding in his first Grand Tour at just 19 years of age, and just a few weeks out from a bad crash at the Tour Auvergne-Rhones-Alpes.
His early-season form suggested he may well be Pogacar's heir – but many experts feel he is being pushed too hard, too soon.
How he fares over the coming three weeks may well answer both of those questions.