Bold Predictions for the 2021 Tour de France

Mark Cavendish (Deceuninck-Quick Step) has won 30 stages at the Tour de France, second on the all-time list behind Belgian legend Eddy Merckx (who won 34). But for a while it looked as if that’s where Cav’s record would remain. He hasn’t raced the Tour since 2018, and hasn’t won a stage since 2016. Heading into this season at age 35 (he’s now 36), few gave him a chance to win anything, let alone a stage at the Tour. In fact, were it not for a last-ditch contract with Deceuninck - Quick-Step, he might not be racing at all.

Moving back to Quick-Step(with whom he raced from 2013 to 2015) has given a boost to the Manx Missile. He’s won five races so far this season, and now starts the Tour following a last-minute knee injury to Ireland’s Sam Bennett, who won two stages and the green jersey last year.

But despite it being nearly five years since Cav last won at the Tour, there’s no better time for him to turn back the clock: the sport lacks a dominant field sprinter, and with a Tour de France that offers them few chances, many teams are leaving their best sprinters at home. Quick-Step, who works magic with riders well past their prime, is also one of the best in the business when it comes to sprinting and has one of the fastest lead-out men in the sport (Denmark’s Michael Mørkøv). So Cav will have all the help he needs.

Sprinting is all about confidence and swagger, something the Wolfpack (and Cavendish) have never lacked. So while we won’t go so far as to say Cavendish will (ever) surpass Merckx, we do think he’ll win at least a stage this year, a crowning achievement for an already incredible career.

This year’s green jersey battle will be one of the most exciting in year’s thanks to an unconventional route with few flat sprint finishes and the fact that last year’s winner, (Bennett) isn’t racing. That leaves former green jersey winners Peter Sagan (BORA-hansgrohe) and Michael Matthews (Team BikeExchange) as the top favorites. And for good reason: they can handle themselves on more challenging stage finishes, and they possess the stamina to make it through the mountains and pick-up points in the second and third week of the Tour. They also ride for teams without major GC aspirations and will have at least a handful of riders at their service.

But if you’re in search of a plausible dark horse, look no further than Italy’s Sonny Colbrelli (Bahrain Victorious), who’s twice finished in the top-5 of the Tour’s Points Classification. Winner of a stage and the green jersey at this year’s Tour of Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné, he put the finishing touches on his Tour de France prep by winning the Italian national championship on Sunday. He’s brimming with confidence, and—like Sagan and Matthews—he’s a strong Classics rider who should be fine on stages too hard for the Tour’s pure field sprinters. He’s also riding for a team without a GC contender, so he’ll have plenty of help. This is going to be a weird Tour for sprinters, making it the perfect year for Italy to win its first green jersey since Alessandro Petacchi in 2010.

This year’s Tour returns to Mont Ventoux for the first time since 2016, and in a big way: during Stage 11, the riders will cover it twice before descending back down to the finish line in Malaucène.

That sounds pretty spectacular on paper. After all, Ventoux is one of the most famous climbs in professional cycling, the site of some of the sport’s most heroic (and tragic) exploits. But we’re hedging out bets. First of all, Stage 11 is too early in the Tour for a stage such as this to have a major impact—especially with four hard days in the Pyrenees and a long individual time trial still to come. The GC contenders will certainly take advantage if they notice someone having a bad day, but we just don’t see it being a day in which someone goes for broke for the sake of winning the Tour—especially with a downhill finish to end the stage.

But that’s where things could get interesting. Most riders are used to climbing Mont Ventoux, but descending it? That’s a different story. If a rider or team senses a bit of fear in one of their key rivals, they could try and push the pace on the ride down to Malaucène, possibly creating costly time gaps before the end of the day. Descending seems to be somewhat of a lost art nowadays, a stage like this offers a perfect opportunity for the better descenders among the Tour’s GC favorites—like France’s Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck - Quick-Step)—to take advantage of their talents.

Slovenians finished 1-2 in last year’s Tour de France with Pogačar overtaking Roglič in the final time trial to win the Tour. Since then, they’ve won 18 races combined, so it makes sense that most put them 1-2 on the list of favorites for this year’s Tour. But neither will win, and here’s why: INEOS Grenadiers.

The British team is bringing perhaps the greatest grand tour roster ever assembled to this year’s Tour. In all, they’re bringing three grand tour champions: Geraint Thomas (2018 Tour de France), Richard Carapaz (2019 Tour of Italy), and Tao Geoghegan Hart (2020 Tour of Italy). Last year’s third-place finisher (and the winner of the recent Critérium du Dauphiné), Richie Porte, is on the roster as well. That’s an embarrassment of riches for any one team to have—especially when combined with some of the strongest and most experienced support riders in the world.

Perhaps the best part is the fact that INEOS is not (publicly) naming a captain. Instead they plan to be the disrupters of this year’s Tour, relentlessly attacking the competition in an attempt to keep everyone guessing. For a team that formulaically won seven Tours between 2012 and 2019, we like their willingness to try and blow-up the race.

In the end, we think the team’s leadership will ultimately come down to Thomas and/or Carapaz, with one of them winning the Tour. Which one? Well, that’s hard to say. Thomas is the better time trialist and will certainly benefit from the two ITT’s included in this year’s route. But Carapaz is one of the sport’s best climbers, and will love the heavy dose of Pyrenees in the Tour’s final week. When it’s all said and done, we could see two INEOS Grenadiers riders on the podium, with Carapz winning the Tour and Thomas time trialing his way to third on the Tour’s penultimate day. Or maybe Thomas wins the Tour and Carapaz slips to third? Or maybe Thomas and Porte? Well, you get the idea.

Pogačar won last year’s Tour in incredible fashion and has since done little to suggest that he won’t defend his title. But if INEOS and its four-headed GC monster falters, we see Roglič--not Pogačar--winning the Tour.

Roglič hasn’t raced since April 25th, an eternity for a pre-Tour favorite even in an era when fewer Tour contenders race themselves into shape. Form-wise, that makes Roglič the biggest unknown among this year’s GC contenders.

But Jumbo-Visma is one of the smartest squads in the sport, with a top-notch coaching staff capable of delivering Roglič to the Tour with the form he needs to win. Case in point: before winning Sunday’s Belgian national championship, Wout van Aert hadn’t raced since April 18th and even had an emergency appendectomy in May. We expect a similar outcome for Roglič, who will likely time his best form to arrive during the Tour’s tough final week.

There’s also the fact that Roglič is (usually) a better time trialist than Pogačar. Yes, Pogačar got the better of Roglič on Stage 20 in last year’s Tour, but that was a very unique time trial, one that started with flat roads and ended atop a Category 1 climb. Stage 20 aside, Roglič and Pogačar have gone head-to-head four times in individual time trials, with Roglič coming out on top in three of them. Most notably, Roglič put 1:29 into Pogačar during a 36km ITT in the 2019 Tour of Spain and :28 during a 14km ITT at the Tour of the Basque Country this past April. Both of these time trials took place on rolling courses, courses very similar to the two time trials in this year’s Tour (Stages 5 and 20). Look for Roglič to bounce back in a big way against the clock (and Pogačar) this year, ultimately proving that last year’s Tour-losing performance on Stage 20 was an anomaly.

And Pogačar won’t be sneaking up on anyone this year. He came to last year’s Tour as a bit of a dark horse. Yes, he had finished third in the previous year’s Tour of Spain, but the 2020 Tour de France was his first, and looking back, there’s a sense that Pogačar wasn’t taken as seriously as he should have been during the first week of the Tour, otherwise the 1:21 that he lost in the crosswinds on Stage 7 would have effectively killed his chances of winning the race overall. This year, every move he makes will be marked, putting pressure on him and his team unlike anything they felt last year.

Last but not least, Roglič himself can now ride as a teeny bit of a dark horse himself, letting Pogačar (as the defending champion) and INEOS (as the Tour’s strongest team) take the responsibility for controlling the race from the outset. Doing so might give his legs a few days to reacclimate to racing again, while forcing his rivals to, as the saying goes, “burn a few matches.” In the end, Roglič’s collapse last year makes it easy to forget that he and Pogačar were basically neck-and-neck the entire race. Were it not for a bad day at the worst possible moment, Roglič would have won the Tour. With almost nine months to reflect on and learn from his mistakes, maybe this year he will.

[Primož Roglič and the Power of Second Chances]