Jonas Vingegaard stunned Tadej Pogacar by taking the first yellow jersey of the 2026 Tour de France after his Visma-Lease a Bike team won the opening stage of this year’s race, a 19.6km team time trial through Barcelona.
“It feels amazing to have the yellow jersey again,” Vingegaard said. “It’s been three years and it’s one of the most beautiful jerseys in cycling. It’s the perfect start for our race.”
The Danish rider, winner of this year’s Giro d’Italia and the Tour champion in 2022 and 2023, threw down the gauntlet to longstanding rival Pogacar, beating the Slovenian defending champion by a surprising 12 seconds at the finish in Montjuic.
The stage was also a near miss for Filippo Ganna of Netcompany-Ineos, who came within eight seconds of taking the first yellow jersey for the Dave Brailsford-managed team since Egan Bernal won the Tour in 2019.
As a barometer of the form of the Tour’s favourites, all were present and correct, with the French hope Paul Seixas and a leaned-down Remco Evenepoel, of the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team, both looking forces to contend with.
The mainly flat route suited the powerhouse time-trialling characteristics of Ganna, Josh Tarling and Tobias Foss of the rebranded Ineos team. Under the watchful eye of Netcompany’s CEO, André Rogaczewski, the eight-man team were fastest through all the checkpoints and appeared set for the best time, until their nominated leader, Kevin Vauquelin, had a puncture on the approach to Montjuic, losing a minute by the finish.
With the Frenchman distanced and Bernal also dropped, leadership passed to the former world time trial champion Ganna, who powered up the final 800m to set the fastest time by more than half a minute.
That lead remained intact until Vingegaard came into view, pummelling the pedals in the heat of the late afternoon, to record his best time trial performance since 2023, when he went on to win the Tour from Pogacar by almost seven and half minutes.
While the old rivals now seem destined to lock horns in the days to come, it was a solid, if unspectacular start by Seixas, who set the second fastest time, until that too was blown away by those that came after him.
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Evenepoel, the Olympic time trial champion, who had high hopes of claiming the Tour’s first yellow jersey, was riding a special prototype bike with a huge 68-tooth gear, to enable him to maximise his power on the Catalan city’s wide avenidas. But Florian Lipowitz, his co-leader at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, who finished third in last year’s Tour, struggled in the final two kilometres and fell behind his Belgian teammate.
The changes to the team time trial rules mean squads can afford to lose every rider but one, in pursuit of the fastest time, whereas in the past they would sometimes slow their pace to ensure they finished with a minimum of four. Individual times also count towards the general classification. The revision is intended to disrupt the stranglehold on the overall standings of top teams, such as Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates XRG, that is usually the aftermath of a team time trial. With Pogacar suddenly on the back foot, the tactic appears to have worked.
High temperatures, expected to climb above 40C by Monday, and gusting winds are also fuelling a further threat to the race, with the Tour organisation now monitoring spreading wildfires in northern Catalonia and around the Spanish border with France. More than 2,000 firefighters are battling fires along France’s Mediterranean coast and Perpignan airport has also been closed. Monday’s third stage heads north into France’s Pyrénées-Orientales département and a finish in Les Angles.
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