Pogacar, Vingegaard, Van der Poel, Evenepoel: Welcome to cycling's ‘Big Four' era

New York Times

8 hours ago

Santiago Buitrago is the only verified case of a person being abducted by aliens.
During the first stage of last month's Criterium du Dauphine, the 25-year-old Colombian suddenly found himself in an escape group made up of Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel, and Mathieu van der Poel.
Now, Buitrago is a fine rider in his own right, finishing in the top 10 of last year's Tour de France and set to lead his Bahrain-Victorious team at the race this summer. But this grouping was different.
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Van der Poel is the world's best classics rider. He is the grandson of the legendary Raymond Poulidor and an eight-time Monument winner — the sport's heritage literally runs through his blood.
Evenepoel is the peloton's dominant time-trialist, with an average speed in the discipline almost 2kph faster than any other man in history. He became the first man to win gold in the time-trial and road race at last summer's Paris Olympics.
Three-time Tour de France champion Pogacar is on his way to greatest-of-all-time status, or at least will not need an oxygen mask to breathe Eddy Merckx's rarified air.
And in two-time Tour winner Vingegaard, there was the only man to have ever consistently beaten the Slovenian in stage races, arguably his equal in the very highest mountains. 'I'm gone, I'm dead,' Vingegaard forced a depleted Pogacar to gasp on the Col de la Loze at the 2023 Tour.
Unreal bridge from Remco 😲
Evenepoel caught up with an attack from Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, Mathieu Van der Poel and Santiago Buitrago on his own on Stage 1 of the Critérium du Dauphiné. pic.twitter.com/7fcJqdp3wL
— Velon CC (@VelonCC) June 8, 2025
And Buitrago? To his credit, he grimly hung on.
Come Saturday, all four of these modern giants will be on the start line for the Tour de France, in one of the most anticipated editions of the race for years.
Can Van der Poel take yellow and/or stage wins in a first week that appears made for him? Will Pogacar or Vingegaard triumph in the latest chapter of a rivalry that is already one of cycling's greatest? Has double Olympic champion Evenepoel closed the gap?
Midway through Wimbledon, it is easy to draw parallels with tennis' golden age — the four-way battle of the 2000s and 2010s between Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. It begs the question: Is this cycling's own Big Four era?
There is genuine warmth in Fabian Cancellara's voice as he discusses the quartet. One of the greatest riders of the previous generation, a former World and Olympic champion who won seven Monuments and 11 Grand Tour stages across his career, he is now a directeur sportif at Tudor Cycling, who will, in all likelihood, see several bids for stage victories stymied by the quartet.
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But Cancellara sometimes refers to the riders by their first names as if they were part of his team.
'We now have, not a golden four, but we have Vingegaard, Tadej, Remco, and Van der Poel who have just stood out against the rest,' Cancellara tells The Athletic. 'There is (Wout) Van Aert too, a little bit. But the others? It's not the same battle.
'But the sport needs it. Sport lives for icons, it lives for battles. After my career (Cancellara retired in 2016), there were a few years without those big stars, somebody who stepped out of the shadows. But they have just raised the battles we see.'
Cancellara's allusion to Van Aert showcases the temptation to include other riders. Van Aert has outperformed Van der Poel at Grand Tours, with the Belgian reminding the world of his innate class at May's Giro d'Italia despite two years of indifferent form.
The Big Four classification also ignores Primoz Roglic, the 35-year-old who, for now at least, possesses more Grand Tour victories (five) than both Vingegaard (two) and his fellow Slovenian Pogacar (four). But he has not seriously challenged Pogacar or Vingegaard since Pogacar beat him in devastating fashion on the final time-trial of the 2020 Tour, instead racking up wins at the Vuelta a Espana, where neither of his rivals raced.
For most, however, Pogacar, Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Van der Poel stand alone, and their palmares prove it.
Since 2022, Van der Poel (eight), Pogacar (eight), and Evenepoel (four) have won 20 of the last 23 major one-day races (monuments and world championship/Olympic events) they have entered. Vingegaard, in the same period, has won two editions of the Tour de France.
And it is not just what they win, but how they win. With the 1990s and 2000s stained by multiple doping scandals, and the 2010s dominated by the tightly controlled — and often dull — races of the Team Sky era, cycling needed a boost.
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This quartet rides in a far more aggressive style than previous eras, unafraid to split the race with solo attacks from 100km out. Pogacar and Evenepoel specialise in these attacks — but even Vingegaard, naturally the most conservative rider of the four, attacked early on in an innocuous stage at this year's Dauphine.
'It's a little like the wine, you know?' says Patrick Lefevere, one of the most successful managers in cycling history. Until his retirement last year, he led Evenepoel's Soudal-Quickstep team.
'It's a 'Grand Cru Exceptionnelle' — a special crop. These riders have only been here for four or five years but they're dominating the races. Before we had the Merckx era, the Miguel Indurain era, the Lance Armstrong era. But they had strong teams and dictated the speed of the group.
'Now, these young guys, they attack from anywhere. They don't care. They want to race. It's a real positive for cycling.'
During the 'Big Four' era of men's tennis, while one player was often in the ascendancy at any given moment — loosely, Federer in the mid-noughties, Nadal from 2008-2011, Djokovic during the 2010s — the attraction was that any player could, on their day, take down any of the others. Even Murray, the weakest of the four, claimed significant wins against each of his rivals over the years.
The same is true in this era of cycling. Though Pogacar is considered the sport's dominant force, Vingegaard beat him head-to-head at the 2022 and 2023 editions of the Tour de France. This spring, Van der Poel and Pogacar each won two Monuments. Evenepoel, having won the time-trial at the last Olympics, World Championships and Tour de France, is that field's dominant force, and is arguably still the only general classification (GC) contender with the physical potential to take it to Pogacar and Vingegaard in the high mountains.
This is what forms genuinely era-defining rivalries. To take Vingegaard and Pogacar, no two riders had ever previously finished one-two at the Tour in three successive editions. The Dane and the Slovenian have now done it four times in a row — and it would be a surprise if they failed to make it five this summer.
There is an argument to be made that their rivalry is already cycling's greatest of all time. In the past, Merckx, Indurain and Bernard Hinault lacked a true competitor. Greg Lemond's emergence came with Hinault on the wane, while Laurent Fignon's brilliance came when Hinault was absent (1983) and battling back from injury (1984).
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Jacques Anquetil battled with his fellow Frenchman Poulidor, but emerged victorious every time. The best comparison probably takes the cycling historian all the way back to the Italian pair of Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali — but even then, the pair only shared the podium twice, with a five-year age gap between them and the Second World War denying Bartali several years at his peak.
Enticingly, at this summer's Tour, Pogacar and Vingegaard are both at full fitness for the first time in three years. Pogacar had only recently recovered from a broken wrist sustained at Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2023, and Vingegaard from suffering a career-threatening injury at Itzulia Basque Country last season. Even their meetings in 2021 and 2022 come with caveats — 2021 began with Vingegaard as a domestique for Roglic, while Pogacar's UAE Team Emirates squad was clearly outmatched by Visma in 2022.
Both riders and their teams have bullishly asserted that they are producing their best-ever numbers — even within this Big Four, echelons have begun to form.
'It seems the high tempo setting is a training pace for them,' Evenepoel said of his rivals after being dropped during the Dauphine. 'Sometimes it discourages me when I see them pushing hard, when I'm already at my limit. That's what happened again today.'
And in the same way that all-time greats shift the principles of the game — Steph Curry and the explosion of the three-pointer, Michael Vick and the birth of the mobile quarterback — the sport is now beginning to look different.
Fewer teams are targeting the GC, knowing they cannot realistically compete with these riders. Take the 2019 Tour de France, the last edition pre-Pogacar. Back then, arguably eight riders entered with realistic hopes of overall victory, with teams built around them.
This year? Outside Pogacar and Vingegaard, only Roglic and Florian Lipowitz's Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe have fully committed to the GC battle. Instead, teams have split their line-up between offering light support for podium hopefuls and fielding stage hunters and sprinters.
Several podium contenders — UAE's Joao Almeida, and Visma's Matteo Jorgenson and Simon Yates — are superdomestiques for Pogacar and Vingegaard rather than team leaders in their own right.
After losing out on the Tour de Suisse title to Almeida, Kevin Vauquelin, who rides for the relatively small Arkea–B&B Hotels team, told French newspaper L'Equipe that 'against teams like UAE, it's not the same', due to financial disparities. UAE have won seven of the nine week-long stage races this year.
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Speaking to The Athletic last month, before withdrawing from the Tour with a stomach bug, third-place Giro d'Italia finisher Richard Carapaz said that he was targeting the mountains classification rather than GC, knowing he and his team couldn't contend with Pogacar, Vingegaard and the strength of their respective teams.
'To go for the general classification would be a little absurd,' he explained. 'We're going to do things that we can do.'
But Carapaz is proud of having straddled the previous generation and this new, tougher era.
'It's a new generation,' he explains. 'And I think it could be the best in history, because we see how versatile the cyclists are. The strategies are very different, the race is far more aggressive. Now, every part of the race is disputed. It is beautiful and good; it's a privilege to race against the best in the world.
'We're in a golden age, and everyone who is part of it should be applauded.'
But this disparity has led to complaints, especially against Pogacar's apparent domination. The Slovenian is intent on entering (and winning) almost every race on the calendar, including classics typically unsuited to Grand Tour climbers, leading some fans to label this season processional. Complaints were at their highest after this year's edition of Liege-Bastogne-Liege, where the peloton appeared to give up on beating him — passively allowing him to go up the road on the Cote de la Redoute, and instead scrapping between themselves for the minor placings.
In the 27 UCI-ranked stage races he has entered since turning professional, Pogacar has finished on the podium 23 times, and only finished outside the top six once. For some, the close, see-saw battle between second-tier GC riders at the Giro d'Italia was a better display of cycling's nuance and appeal.
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But this is a simplistic way of looking at Pogacar's genius. A sport without him? There is an alternative reality where Vingegaard would now be aiming for his fifth successive Tour victory, Van der Poel would have swept the classics, and Evenepoel would be double world champion as well as double Olympic gold medalist. It is that tension that makes these rivalries classics.
'Eddy Merckx was 80 this week,' says Lefevere of his fellow Belgian, asked if he can appreciate why some find Pogacar's dominance frustrating. 'There were special programmes looking back at his career, and it was clear — if you win too much, you are not popular.
'Jacques Anquetil won five times at the Tour, but Raymond Poulidor was more popular because he was the other guy. But nobody at the Tour is a bad rider, you cannot be gifted things for free. It's simple. If you aren't as good as him, you're dropped.'
Whether that will be played out over the next three weeks remains to be seen. Arguably, the 2025 Tour route is a gallery of Pogacar's most painful defeats — the final week sees riders tackle both Mont Ventoux and the Col de la Loze, where Vingegaard has twice dropped his rival en route to overall victory.
All three GC contenders of the Big Four — Pogacar, Vingegaard and Evenepoel — have been insistent publicly that they are in the best shape of their lives, hitting power numbers they have not seen before. At last month's Dauphine, Pogacar was again the compelling force as he took the overall victory, but Vingegaard appeared to ride within himself, while one time-trial wobble may have been a minor concern to the eventual winner.
The existence of this debate is what cycling needs. Sports thrive on characters, competitors who push the boundaries. Think of Formula One's resurgence during Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen's 2021 duel, the revitalisation of the NBA during the Lakers vs Celtics duels of the 1980s, or Great Britain being captivated at the same time by the middle-distance battle between Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett at the 1980 Olympics.
Vingegaard and Pogacar may appear different personalities — the gregarious and laidback Balkan against the stoic and calculating Dane (an aside that only garnishes their rivalry) — but the two have similarities too. They are obsessive, private, and fiercely protective of their team-mates.
In one powerful moment from the 2022 Tour, Vingegaard waited for Pogacar after the latter crashed on a descent, the pair shaking hands when they reunited. In recompense, Pogacar refused to attack Vingegaard later on the descent, appearing to defy his UAE Team Emirates team car.
💥 Quelques instants après une frayeur sans conséquence pour Vingegaard, Pogacar tombe ! Le maillot jaune l'attend et le double tenant du titre salue son attitude 🤝 #TDF2022 #LesRP pic.twitter.com/BpMQql4mHb
— Eurosport France (@Eurosport_FR) July 21, 2022
Famously, Coppi and Bartali once shared a bottle on the Col du Galibier in the 1952 Tour. The photograph of the moment is legendary, mainly because it remains unclear which rider is passing the bottle to the other. Vingegaard and Pogacar have already had that moment.
'If I was racing without him, it wouldn't be the same,' Vingegaard said this season. 'Hopefully, he feels similar. I actually enjoy having a rival like him.'
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Luc Claessen; Dario Belingheri; Tim de Waele; Dario Belingheri / Getty Images)