Maybe This Tour de France Won’t Be a Pogačar Cakewalk After All

Jonas Vingegaard in the yellow jersey and Tadej Pogačar left chasing — no one expected to see that in the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France.

The Tour’s experimental team time trial did exactly what organizers hoped for Saturday in steamy Barcelona.

It put Vingegaard back in yellow for the first time since 2023, and reminded everyone that Pogačar just might not be on cruise control all the way to Paris.

The biggest takeaway Saturday isn’t the 12 seconds Vingegaard snatched away from Pogačar, but rather a subtle but important narrative shift right out of the gates.

Visma-Lease a Bike struck first and ever so slightly put UAE Emirates-XRG on the back foot.

Will this prove decisive when the Tour ends in Paris? Almost certainly not.

But the Tour suddenly feels a little bit more open than it did 24 hours ago.

Here are the biggest winners and losers after Saturday’s wild opener:

Visma lands the first punch

Visma came with a squad built for the Tour’s new team time trial format and delivered Vingegaard a yellow-and-black launchpad to the foot of Montjuïc.

Then he finished off the job.

Even more important than the 12 seconds and the yellow jersey is something that Vingegaard hasn’t had since his horrific crash at the 2024 Itzulia Basque Country — self-belief.

After watching Pogačar bulldoze almost everything for the past two seasons, that psychological boost matters.

Vingegaard also confirmed he’s arriving fresh enough after the Giro d’Italia to go 21 rounds with Pogačar.

“It’s been a few bad years for me. I’ve been at times struggling in the past few years, laying there in the ground believing that I am going to die,” Vingegaard said of the 2024 crash.

From there back to yellow could help lift Vingegaard across the next three weeks.

Pogačar finally has to respond

OK, let’s not get carried away.

Pogačar didn’t have a bad day. He actually climbed Montjuïc faster than everyone else and earned King of the Mountain jersey honors.

The problem was that UAE couldn’t match Visma on the flats before the climb.

Unlike Netcompany-Ineos or Visma, UAE wasn’t built to dominate a 20-minute team time trial. It was bleeding seconds on the flats.

When Pogačar turned on the afterburners, Montjuïc simply wasn’t long enough.

Even Peak Pogačar could only claw back three seconds over the final kilometer.

The four-time Tour winner won’t be losing any sleep over it, but for the first time all season, Pogačar was closing a gap rather than ripping one open.

Maybe this Tour won’t be another procession after all.

“Good news. I have climbing legs,” Pogačar said. “All the team did super good today, everybody went over the limit. Also thanks to the team I have this result today.”

The GC already has shape

Nobody loses the Tour on stage 1 (unless you crash out), but riders can definitely lose options.

Netcompany-Ineos hit second and nearly won its first yellow jersey since Egan Bernal won the Tour in 2019, but Kévin Vauquelin had the bad luck to puncture right near the base of Montjuic to lose 1:14.

Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek) quietly delivered one of the top rides of the day, finishing best of the rest at 16 seconds slower to remind everyone he might deserve a spot behind cycling’s Big Two.

Remco Evenepoel missed out on his stated goal of winning the stage and taking yellow,  stopping the clock at 19 seconds slower, after Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe struggled across the flatter opening kilometers.

The bigger concern for Red Bull may be Florian Lipowitz.

The German whittled in the Barcelona heat and immediately ceded 16 seconds to Evenepoel and 39 seconds to Vingegaard.

It’s only one stage, but if Red Bull is going to let those two race is out for the next three weeks, Saturday nudged the balance in favor of Evenepoel.

“I knew I had to carry the weight in the final stretch to ride as fast as possible on the climbs. I did my thing in the finale,” Evenepoel said. “We started fast, everyone does what they can. I don’t think it could have been much faster.”

Del Toro wins Round 1 over Seixas

Isaac del Toro won the first round in the Tour’s rookie rivalry with Paul Seixas.

No, they’re not racing each other, but everyone will compare them anyway.

The Mexican finished sixth, 26 seconds behind Vingegaard, while Seixas lost 39 seconds in his long-awaited Tour debut.

Some of that came down to team strength, with Decathlon-CMA CGM struggling on the flats.

Seixas had a huge mass of family and friends cheering him on in Barcelona. The Seixas mania will only grow.

Tour’s TTT format a big winner

The biggest winner Saturday may have been how well the TTT format played out.

Some old-school Tour fans questioned the decision to time every rider individually instead of taking the fifth rider across the line.

Instead, it delivered just what organizers were hoping for.

All the top stars were sprinting up Montjuic at full-gas in front of a packed house, and rather than see huge gaps after the TTT, the GC is still tightly bundled.

There are just enough gaps between the big names to make things interesting, but not so much that the GC feels cooked on Day 1.

And after only 19.6 kilometers, the Tour already has some super-sized drama.