You can tell men’s cycling isn’t a serious sport because the “Big Six” athletes come from four small nations—Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Slovenia—with a combined population of 38 million. Meet the rogues’ gallery of minor European whiteness: Remco Evenepoel, Wout van Aert, Jonas Vingegaard, Mathieu van der Poel, Primož Roglič, and Tadej Pogačar. Add the top women and you at least get one Italian, the excellently named Elisa Longo Borghini, and possibly a Pole, the dashing Kasia Niewiadoma. But in women’s cycling the top ranks are if anything more dominated by the vestigial organs of Westphalian sovereignty, the Benelux countries. Unquestionably the best three women, the frenemies Demi Vollering, Lotte Kopecky, and Lorena Wiebes, hail from Belgium and the Netherlands. Is there any other global athletic endeavor whose competitors are only becoming more white and less international?
To love cycling of all sports in 2025 requires a hard look at yourself, and perhaps some special pleading. As a white guy of a certain age—with knees too old to keep running, too much pride to join the old folks at the pool, and newfound disposable income to blow on carbon fiber and lycra—I fit the profile.
Starting in the 1980s, cycling globalized enough to include the United States, first in the form of the corn-fed wife guy Greg LeMond, and later the EPO fiend and all-around psychopath Lance Armstrong. They were accompanied by a small group of Latin American riders, such as the Mexican Raúl Alcalá and the Colombian Lucho Herrera, whose promising wins were followed in the 2010s by an epochal cohort of riders, including the by turns joyful and ferocious Colombians Rigoberto Urán and Nairo Quintana and the tenacious Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz, nicknamed El Jaguar de Tulcan. The new torchbearer for this generation, the Colombian Egan Bernal, won the Tour de France in 2019 only to take a training ride in 2022 that led him full speed into the back of a bus. Despite a heroic recovery, Bernal has not been the same rider since. This year’s Giro d’Italia witnessed the return of Carapaz to top form, along with the rise of a new hemispheric hope, the 21-year-old Mexican Isaac del Toro, who wore the race leader’s pink jersey for eleven days only to lose in the final mountain stage.
In the grand scheme of things, this was all a sideshow. The man who beat Carapaz and del Toro at the Giro, Simon Yates, is a washed-up Brit who gave up on his own team-leader ambitions after a disappointing half decade, and will serve as a support rider for his real team leader, Jonas Vingegaard, at the Tour de France. Not a single Latin American woman, meanwhile, can be found among the top one hundred riders in the sport.
As for the Americans, the current crop is perhaps best known for their Trumpism. The mutton-chopped Coloradan Quinn Simmons likes to celebrate his victories with a six-shooter hand gesture at the finish line; the Red Bull–sponsored time trialist Chloé Dygert opposes trans rights, Colin Kaepernick, and “feminism.” There are exceptions: Neilson Powless, a powerful breakaway specialist, in 2019 became the first Native American to compete in the Tour de France. The surprise winner of the 2024 Olympic road race, Kristen Faulkner, is a product of Phillips Andover and Harvard who worked in venture capital in Silicon Valley before turning pro, and likes to crack jokes about Trump’s tariffs on Twitter. (I have this weird crush on Faulkner; I’m not sure what that’s about.)
Then there’s the rest of the world. Australia and New Zealand have broken through in recent decades in a serious way, with Cadel Evans winning the Tour in 2011 and a current generation near the top of the sport. East, Central, and South Asia and the Middle East are essentially nonexistent at the highest echelons; only Kazakhstan managed to turn its investments in sportswashing (the current XDS–Astana team) into sponsorship for its own top riders, Alexander Vinokourov and Alexey Lutsenko. The punchy Eritrean rider Biniam Girmay made history in 2024 by becoming the first Black African rider to win a stage at the men’s Tour de France—a breakthrough he then drove home by winning two more stages, plus the green jersey for best sprinter, one of the race’s three main prizes. Girmay was also the only Black rider in the entire race. (White African riders have previously reached the peak of the sport, most notably the Kenyan four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome, now sportswashing full time on team Israel–Premier Tech.) Girmay’s enormous talents won the day last year, but his specialties—the one-day spring “classics” and tough sprint stages in multi-day events like the Tour de France—require extraordinary luck or talent without the support of a strong team. His place in the minds of the men who run the sport is made clear by the second-tier teams that first signed him. The subsequent failure to elevate Girmay to one of the top-tier teams that befit his gifts is an embarrassment to the entire sport.1
No matter who you are, when it comes to keeping yourself at the front of the pack—not getting “washed,” in cycling lingo—anyone born more than a few hundred miles from Antwerp is generally doomed. In the dark arts of “positioning,” even the German tank of a cyclist Nils Politt, whose shoulders alone look wide enough to clear out any road, is at a loss. Some of the top candidates to win the Tour basically require a personal Belgian to safely lead them through the whirlpool that is the modern peloton. The Slovenian Tadej Pogačar has one: Tim Wellens. The Dane Jonas Vingegaard has two: Tiej Benoot and Victor Campenaerts. (Remco Evenepoel is Belgian himself, so he can make do with a mere Dutchman, Pascal Eenkhoorn.) The closer you look, the more embarrassing the sport becomes.
So why follow cycling? Because, insofar as watching other people exercise can be excused at all, it is so beautiful. Road cycling is both the most expansive and the most intimate of any major sport. The arena is as large as the Alps and as small as a provincial village. And everywhere the race goes, it is open, for free, to anyone. Around 12 million people lined the roads of France to watch the Tour last year. When the stars slow to a few kilometers per hour on the steepest slopes you can, and many do, literally reach out and touch them—though of course you shouldn’t, you irresponsible freak. (I’m not sure I could stop myself.) In the NBA, if you pay enough, you can sit courtside, feel a few drops of sweat fly your way, and maybe jump out of the way when a player goes flying off the court. In cycling it’s common, and well within the rules, to give a fallen rider a healthy push as they hop back on the bike and struggle to regain speed.
A single person on two wheels stands one step up from nature itself: a game of humanity and its most basic technologies. And while there are many subgames in modern road cycling, the only game that really matters is who crosses the finish line first.2 Whether a one-day race on the flat or a three-week tour across the Alps, a bike race is as elemental as a hundred-meter dash. But while a footrace may be entertaining, a connection with the simplicity of our forebears, in a bunch sprint at the end of a bike race—as Lorena Wiebes hits 60 kph or Tim Merlier hits 70 kph—humanity effectively emerges from its self-imposed immaturity. It is the fastest we go by means of our own strength: assisted, yes, by mechanical advantage, but not by motor or animal power or the force of gravity. “If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom,” wrote the historian Eric Hobsbawm, “the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx has called the full realization of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks.”
A recent online meme asked which sport’s athletes had the most aura. The competition isn’t even close. While badass pistol shooters got attention at last year’s Olympics, while Steph Curry sunk a dagger-like final three, the Belgian phenom Remco Evenepoel rolled up to the finish line of the 270 kilometer men’s road race with more than a minute lead and proceeded to place his bike on the line while the cameras zoomed out to frame his silhouette against the Eiffel Tower.
And that wasn’t even a race in the mountains. To picture what happens when the Tour hits the Alps, imagine if a penalty shot in soccer took place with a thousand screaming fans lining the box, and you’re close. Imagine if the winning touchdown run in American football took the running back down a gauntlet of fans—you’re closer. Now imagine this isn’t happening in some puny stadium but in the arena of the gods: the Col de Granon, the Col de Galibier, Mont Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez. Guys are lighting flares for no good reason, other than that it looks awesome. (It’s banned, who cares.) There’s confetti in the air. You’re about to go down the other side at 100 kilometers per hour and your heart is pushing 200 beats per minute. You’re three weeks into the race, there’s two more mountains to go, and tomorrow you’ll get up tomorrow and do exactly the same thing. The mountain stages in the Tour are, quite simply, completely insane. They are by far the greatest test of athletic capacity in any sport. A marathon is a mere couple of hours on one day, with at most a few hills. The Tour is around five hours per day for three weeks over 3,300 kilometers and 50,000 meters of climbing. There’s a reason cycling is the only major sport covered by helicopter: it’s aura farming for miles.
The Tour is not only one of France’s great cultural exports; it is also, although an invention of the right-wing French press in the early 20th century, essentially a product of the dirigiste decades of the 1950s and 1960s, when the modern race took shape. On the model of French postwar industrial champions like Renault—of which the French government remains the largest shareholder—the privately held Amaury Sport Organisation, which nominally holds title to the Tour, really only manages the race on behalf of the state. One of the great pleasures of the race is the window it offers on what public life might look like if it were more social democratic, more midcentury, more French: a world of high consumerism, yes, with brand names plastered on uniforms and a caravan of candy-colored fruit- and brie-shaped cars preceding the peloton, throwing free yellow T-shirts to the crowd and handing out packs of Haribo candy and cans of Orangina—but also a world where mammon knew limits, and where things like tradition and the sheer ambition to test the limits of human ability carried at least equal weight with commercial potential.
Today no one trying to maximize the sport’s revenue would come up with anything like the Tour: a three-week event, largely far away from major cities, in France of all places, where nothing happens for hours on end. For now, the Silicon Valley and Saudi investors who have lately tried to take over cycling know better than to suggest they would start messing with the Tour. But the ultimate goal might well be to refashion the race as a shorter, tighter, more urban, less insane event. Instead we get a race that may vary year to year and decade to decade, but whose outlines have remained fixed since the 1950s. Savor it while we still can.
As in every previous edition of the Tour, the one guaranteed winner in 2025 is the French countryside. The biggest mistake newcomers make is to think that television coverage of the Tour is like that of other sports, meant to be watched minute by minute. Instead, three weeks of cycling is best understood as an excuse to switch on what for significant portions of the broadcast amounts to a screensaver of la France profonde: verdant valleys, medieval villages, alpine passes. Even in France itself, according to polling, two-thirds of viewers see the scenery as the race’s major attraction; only a third claim to care about the actual athletic outcome. Each day’s itinerary is constructed as much around the potential for broadcast spectacle as for competition. Then there’s the 200-or-so kilometer “sprint stage” whose sole purpose is to convey the riders from, say, Normandy to the Pyrenees. Get ready for a four-and-a-half-hour French travelogue in which the play-by-play broadcasters may halfheartedly try to convince you that a few riders from second-tier teams with a minute or two lead on the peloton might actually have a chance to win. The key with these stages is to only pay attention when a particularly intriguing château comes on screen, or else when the flamme rouge appears—the red flag, signifying that less than one kilometer remains before the explosive 70 kph sprint at the end.
The next-surest thing after the campagne is the clear favorite for this year’s men’s race: the eternally boyish Slovenian 26-year-old Tadej Pogačar. Pog, as he is universally known, is too joyful a rider to hate, but also too dominant to not want to hate. To cheer for his team, the Italy-based sovereign wealth fund–sponsored UAE Team Emirates XRG, is like cheering for the Yankees, without the excuse that you might have been born in the Bronx or raised as a Yankee fan; the team was founded in 1999 as Lampre—named for its sponsor, Italy’s “world leader in metal coating”—and only assumed its current form in 2017.
Pogačar’s primary opponent is the somewhat skeletal 28-year-old Dane Jonas Vingegaard. All the top Tour contenders look a bit gaunt above the waist, but some wear it better: Vingegaard lies in the uncanny valley between a buccal fat removal operation gone too far and a child whom you’d like to offer an extra serving of ice cream. You feel a sense of concern that’s generally absent with Vingegaard’s opponents. This is misleading: when it comes to the high mountains, the guy is a killer. After Pogačar won the 2020 and 2021 Tours, Vingegaard returned to completely destroy his rival in the 2022 and 2023 Tours. As Pogačar told his team after he “cracked”—metaphorically the richest term in the cycling lexicon—and lost five minutes trying to follow Vingegaard up the Col de La Loze in 2023: “I’m gone, I’m dead.”
Vingegaard rides for the Netherlands-based Visma–Lease a Bike, a team with a lineage dating back to 1984, currently sponsored by a Norwegian software company and a Dutch cycling conglomerate. With budgets around €50 million, almost twice the average across the peloton, UAE and Visma boast both the Tour’s two top riders and seven-man crews of support riders, most of whom could take starring roles on other teams. After Pogačar’s defeats in 2022 and 2023, last year UAE put the entire budget to work and lined him up behind no less than three different riders who could plausibly make the top five in the Tour. In the event, this proved overkill: Vingegaard suffered a hard crash early in the season that left him without his usual endurance in the third week—and Pogačar went on a tear across the spring and early summer calendar, pulling off what many believe to be the greatest single-year record in the sport’s history. (He also won the fall world championship road race in unprecedented fashion.) Despite Vingegaard’s valiant showing in the first half of last year’s Tour, including a shock in stage 11 when he outsprinted Pogačar at the finish line for the first time—Pogačar always has a late burst, while Vingegaard specializes in grinding away on long climbs—in the end the Slovenian unlocked some secret level of human capacity and thoroughly destroyed the Dane and everyone else, setting new records on the climbs across the final week.
Going into the 2025 season, the main conversation in men’s cycling was whether Pogačar was already goated, or merely would be soon. The basic drama of the 2025 Tour promised to be whether Vingegaard could prove the kryptonite to Pogačar’s superpower, the one guy he could never quite consistently beat. I’m still holding out hope that after trading head-to-head contests in the last four Tours, the back-and-forth will continue this year and the Dane will find some new way to crack his opponent. The course itself seems designed with this in mind: the first week includes an unusual number of hilly stages suited to Pogačar’s punchier style, while the last week runs the gambit of the long high-altitude climbs where Vingegaard previously found his advantage.
Unfortunately for the race, after a dominant performance in the first week, Pogačar seems primed to prevail in the final week as well. Whether because of improved training or nutrition or because of the lasting effects on Vingegaard of last year’s crash, Pogačar to all appearances is stronger than Vingegaard even on the latter’s favored terrain. I’m hoping for another all-time classic like the 2022 tour—look up stage 11 on YouTube for a sense of what contemporary cycling can be at its very best—but realistically, we should expect another Pogačar romp, a tiresome spectacle of Witnessing Greatness.
There is also a chance, however small, that the perpetually up-and-coming Belgian Remco Evenepoel will leave behind a disappointing early season and prove he can beat Pogačar and Vingegaard not only on his favorite terrain‚ the flat time trial, but in the mountains as well. The veteran among the top candidates, the insouciant 35-year-old Slovenian Primož Roglič, might also somehow rise to a new level and, most importantly, learn not to crash out early on, as he has in every Tour since 2020. (His performance so far has not been promising.) Roglič is also contending with a challenge for team leadership from a young German, the 24-year-old Florian Lipowitz, who made an impressive showing at a preparatory race in June. Watch for a moment in the mountains when Roglič is struggling and Lipowitz has to decide whether to slow down and help out, or ride on to pursue his own ambitions.
Just before the men’s Tour wraps up in Paris on July 27, the women’s Tour will take off in Brittany on July 26. A successor to a series of failed races going back to 1984, the current Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift (a title we should all refuse—the men’s Tour is not called the Tour de France Hommes, let alone marred by a title sponsor) dates only to 2022. The race is the product of a larger movement in the last decade or so to support women in the sport, promoted by groups such as Le Tour Entier and the Cyclists’ Alliance.3
The women’s Tour remains much shorter than the men’s, with just nine stages to the men’s Tour’s twenty-one. On the one hand, rather than commit to a money-losing three-week edition that might seem more immediately egalitarian, the organizers want a race that can sustain itself financially while gradually developing into a full-scale version of the Tour. On the other, it’s not at all clear that the men’s version should be considered the natural or proper length of the race. For a range of reasons, women’s one-day races have already settled at shorter lengths than men’s, and the cyclists themselves seem to prefer this. As current US national champion Kristen Faulkner joked recently about the traditional length of men’s one day races: “Today we’re doing a 6-hour endurance ride so it’s basically like a men’s race—long, boring, and predictable.” (Other riders, like Faulkner’s retired former teammate Lizzie Stannard, disagree.)
At present the women race quite differently than the men, with fewer breakaways and more defensive riding, yet with a corresponding tendency for the entire peloton to burst apart into many small groups. One of the great surprises of the past few years has been to watch women’s racing emerge as an effectively new sport. The differences may be because, as sports science research has shown, the physiological demands of the races are different (with shorter lengths, riders spend more time riding at higher intensity); or because the teams are smaller and the pay lower, resulting in less athletic breadth and thus less capacity for teams to exercise control; or simply because of the sport’s autonomous development. Whatever the case, while the men’s Tour can be enjoyed as a kind of heritage product of the trente glorieuses, the women’s Tour will come into its own as a product of the present. You can be skeptical of the commercial forces involved—avec Zwift? putain!—but you can’t deny that it’s exciting to watch.
The 2025 race begins against the backdrop of the closest and most thrilling edition of any Tour, men’s or women’s, ever ridden. In 2024, the superteam of the women’s peloton, the Netherlands-based SD Worx–Protime, entered the race with the favorite for the overall win, the attacking Dutch climber Demi Vollering, along with the favorite for day-to-day stage wins, the explosive Dutch sprinter Lorena Wiebes. (Meanwhile Lotte Kopecky, the team’s pugnacious Belgian all-rounder and the best one-day racer in the world, sat out the Tour to prepare for the Olympics.) The route seemed perfectly designed for Vollering, who was defending her previous year’s Tour title, and she took a 22-second overall lead after stage 4 as the race headed south toward the Alps. Vollering’s strongest opponent, based on events earlier in the season, was likely to be her own team, which had not long before tried to chase her down in order to give Kopecky a chance to beat her. In the event, a large crash in the peloton toward the end of stage 5 left Vollering, who broke her tailbone yet still leaped back onto her bike, more than a minute behind her competitors. Meanwhile, her team, in a fruitless attempt to bring Wiebes to the front for a sprint, failed to stop to help Vollering ride back to the front of the race. This is unheard of in professional cycling—by far the greatest failure to support the Tour’s leader, let alone the race’s defending champion, in anyone’s memory.4 “I did see something yellow on the ground,” Wiebes later explained, referring to Vollering’s jersey after the latter fell, and making clear that whatever the difficulties with the team’s radios, she was fully aware her leader had crashed and was in need.
What followed was no less baffling, or thrilling. On the Tour’s final day, stage 8, among the most difficult in the history of women’s professional cycling, the peloton first crossed the huge Col du Glandon (1,924 meters) before finishing on Alp d’Huez (1,423 meters). A few hundred meters from the top of the Glandon, Vollering rode away from all but one rival—the Dutch rider Pauliena Rooijakkers—while the race leader going into the stage, Kasia Niewiadoma of Poland, full-on cracked and fell far behind. On the final climb, Vollering appeared set to take back the minute and fifteen seconds that separated her from Niewiadoma—except that Rooijakkers, her companion in the breakaway, was two seconds ahead of Vollering in the standings and refused to fully collaborate. Then, as Niewiadoma hit Alpe d’Huez, she revived and began to regain lost time on both Vollering and Rooijakkers. At different moments in the final kilometers, all three women looked set to win the race, albeit by mere seconds. After Rooijakkers rode away from Vollering, Vollering counterattacked and took the stage win—only for Niewiadoma, following a minute or so behind, to climb as she had never climbed before and, sprinting to the finish, limit her loss to one minute and one second. After eight days and twenty-four hours of riding, Niewiadoma had won the Tour by the smallest margin in history: four seconds.
With the grand départ of the women’s Tour still two weeks away, the full start lists for each team remain to be announced. After last season’s shenanigans, Vollering transferred to a new team, the French-based FDJ–Suez, where she joins two other top-ten finishers from last year, the French riders Évita Muzic and Juliette Labous. If Vollering isn’t guaranteed team leadership, she at least faces far less chance of betrayal from her teammates. Meanwhile, one of her former nemeses, the current world champion Kopecky, has decided to set aside her usual focus on the one-day races where she most excels and focus on winning the Tour. Vollering’s former coach, the retired 35-year-old Dutch star Anna van der Breggen, also decided 2025 was the year take to the road again—by replacing Vollering on her own old team, SD Worx.
You would think all this would be the perfect set-up for a Vollering 2025 revenge tour, and indeed the one-time student already outsprinted her former teacher at a hilly one-day classic earlier this season. But Vollering seems constitutionally incapable of playing mean. She just wants to be liked—and win. Perhaps blithe victory will prove an even greater reward. I’m a fan of Niewiadoma, and I’ll be rooting for at least one outsider in this whole drama, the Swiss rider Marlen Reusser, who came back from illness and injuries last year to win several early season races in 2025. With one more mountain stage added to this year’s race, bringing the total to nine, this is once again Vollering’s terrain. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing her wearing something yellow again this year, and back where she belongs: at the top of the podium.
It is also no exception. As recently as 2017, one of Girmay’s predecessors in the dubious honor of being the only Black rider in the Tour de France, the Frenchman Kévin Reza, was taunted with racist slurs mid-race by the Italian rider Gianni Moscon. A more or less “replacement level” rider, in the current sabermetric sports lingo, Moscon remains in the men’s peloton to this day and will ride in the 2025 Tour. It’s hard to imagine the same outcome for any non-European rider. As Girmay’s Eritrean countryman Merhawi Kudus explained to Cycling News last year, “My manager always he told me if they try to compare between a European and me, it’s hard to choose me,” not because of “performance” but because of other, always ambiguous “conditions.” ↩
As for doping: precisely because of its history, cycling after 2009 became by far the most surveilled sport in the modern world. If cyclists are still doping in significant numbers—and I don’t see any strong reasons to believe they are—then athletes in every other sport are surely doping more. ↩
In 2016 that push produced its most important breakthrough with the formation of a full women’s World Tour series alongside the men’s top-level races. In addition to the women’s Tour de France, there are now women’s editions of both the Italian and Spanish tours—the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta—and the most important one-day races like Milano–San Remo, the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Paris-Roubaix, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. ↩
In the end, yet another teammate of Vollering and Wiebes who had made her way into a breakaway won the stage—making even clearer the selfishness of the attempt by Wiebes and her teammates to get to the front rather than help their ostensible leader. ↩
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