Tadej Pogacar chases a Tour and Vuelta double. Since 1995 only Chris Froome did it.
Tadej Pogacar begins the 81st Vuelta a España today in Monaco. He is chasing a 7th Grand Tour win and a Tour-Vuelta double in the same year.
What happened
Pogacar starts the Vuelta a España on Saturday as overwhelming favourite, one month after winning the Tour de France by nearly six and a half minutes, and stands one victory from becoming only the ninth rider to win all three Grand Tours.
A win in Granada on would complete his set. The Vuelta a España is the one Grand Tour, cycling’s three-week races, that Pogacar has never won. Victory would be his seventh Grand Tour win and would make him only the ninth rider to have won all three.
Pogacar last rode the Vuelta in 2019, seven years ago. At 20, in his first Vuelta, he finished third and won three stages.
The route is 3,275km long, with 21 stages between and . It starts with an individual time trial, a race against the clock, in Monaco on . Pogacar lives in Monaco.
The race then crosses Provence and enters Spain through Andorra and the Pyrenees. There is a mountain-top finish at Font Romeu on stage three and several more before the end in Granada. The rest days are on and .
One month ago Pogacar won his fifth Tour de France, equalling the record, and he won the 2024 Giro d’Italia by a wide margin. His UAE team is built around Almeida, Vine and Sivakov.
His main rival is Primoz Roglic, who has won the Vuelta four times. Richard Carapaz won two Tour stages in July, including Alpe d’Huez, and Scotland’s Oscar Onley finished fourth at the 2025 Tour.
Sources: The Guardian, ESPN, La Vuelta
The Pattern
Since 1995 only one Tour winner has also won the Vuelta that year. That was when the Vuelta moved from spring to the end of the season, and the calendar has decided how hard the double is ever since. Three riders have ever won both races in the same year. Below are all three, plus the two Tour winners since 1995 who tried and fell short.
Show the other 3 cases
The Read
History says a Tour winner who rides the Vuelta finishes near the top. All three who tried since 1995 finished in the top three, and one of them won. Pogacar won the Tour by nearly six and a half minutes a month ago and won the 2024 Giro easily. This Vuelta is also missing the other riders from the Tour podium. The route suits him, with a time trial in his home city and then many mountain-top finishes for the strongest climber in the race.
The weak point is tiredness. Chris Froome in 2016 and Jonas Vingegaard in 2023 were dominant Tour winners, and fresher rivals beat them in the third week. Primoz Roglic has won this race four times and skipped the Tour. Pogacar has not raced a Grand Tour into September since 2019.
The forecast fails if he loses real time in the Monaco time trial or at Font Romeu on stage three, or if a crash or illness ends his race, which no history can predict. His team could also give away the leader’s jersey on purpose to save energy. That would settle the rest-day market as NO without changing the bigger picture.
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