Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard have been putting on a great Tour de France every year since 2021. Pogacar was the strongest in 2021, before Vingegaard won consecutively in 2022 and 2023. The Slovenian struck back this year with a dominant overall victory. So it's 2-2, and in another statistic, the two rivals barely give an inch to each other.
In the final weekend of the Tour de France, cycling journalist Daniel Friebe presented a statistic showing that Pogacar and Vingegaard differed by a total of 22 seconds over 83 Tour stages in four years. "Calculations by ChatGPT, so fingers crossed," he humorously added. However, the calculations turned out to be slightly off, as noted by the statistics website Procyclingstats.
Pogacar took 328 hours, 24 minutes, and 46 seconds over 84 stages, covering 13,667.1 kilometers. Vingegaard reportedly did it in 328 hours, 26 minutes, and 11 seconds. This amounts to a difference of 1 minute and 25 seconds, as calculated. "We should be cautious about concluding that Pogacar was faster in the last four Tours; that would be incorrect," it is noted.
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This becomes apparent when considering that Pogacar collected a lot of bonus seconds throughout those Tour stages, totaling 199. Vingegaard earned 111. That’s 3 minutes and 19 seconds versus 1 minute and 51 seconds, a difference of 1 minute and 28 seconds. So, if we exclude the bonus seconds and compare the pure race times of both riders, a bizarre conclusion emerges: Vingegaard was 3 seconds (!) faster than his Slovenian rival across four editions. Pogacar's time was 328 hours, 28 minutes, and 2 seconds, compared to Vingegaard's 328 hours, 28 minutes, and 5 seconds.
Interestingly, Pogacar won with minutes to spare in 2021 and 2024, while Vingegaard did so in 2022 and 2023. It is clear, however, just how evenly matched the two are.