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At Pro Cycling Stats, we asked ourselves: what if these four Tours de France were combined into one long Tour? Who would come out on top?

The calculation is quite straightforward.

Figure 1. Total GC time over Tour de France editions 2021-2024.

If you add up the final standings times, two things immediately stand out. First, Pogačar's total time over the last four Tours de France is slightly less than Vingegaard's. Second, the difference is incredibly small. After 13667.1 kilometers of racing, Pogačar's total time is 1 minute and 25 seconds less than Vingegaard's.

Alright, that's all well and good. But we need to be cautious about jumping to the conclusion that Pogačar was faster over the last four Tours. That would be faulty. Let's leave it to the legs to decide. Which rider made the difference on the road, mano a mano?

Over the course of the last four Tours de France Tadej Pogačar gathered a total amount of 199 bonification seconds, equaling 3:19. Jonas Vingegaard took 111 boni's, equaling 1:51.

Figure 2. Total GC time over Tour de France editions 2021-2024.

If we add the bonification seconds to their total time over the past four Tours de France, something remarkable happens. It's not Pogačar who emerges as the big winner, but Vingegaard. The difference, however, is astonishingly small. Jonas Vingegaard covered the 13,667.1 kilometers 3 seconds faster than Pogačar. 3 seconds over such a distance! That's equivalent to 0.00000006379 km/h. Are they closely matched? I think so.

Figure 3. Accumulated timegap in seconds in the GC between Pogačar and Vingegaard in the Tour de France since 2021.

Another observation is that over the past four Tours de France, Jonas Vingegaard gained time on Tadej Pogačar six times. Pogačar, on the other hand, gained time on Vingegaard on 20 stages.

Whatever the odds may be, this duel is far from over. We're looking forward to the next episode.