Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard have been putting on a great Tour de France every year since 2021. Pogacar was the strongest in 2021, while Vingegaard won back-to-back in 2022 and 2023. The Slovenian returned this year with a dominant overall victory. So 2-2 and in another statistic, the two rivals barely leave any distance between each other.

On the final weekend of the Tour de France, cycling journalist Daniel Friebe presented a statistic showing that Pogacar and Vingegaard had raced 83 Tour stages in four years with a total difference of 22 seconds. “The calculations made by ChatGPT therefore fingers crossed“, he added humorously. However, as the statistics website noted, the calculations turned out to be slightly wrong Probike statistics.

Pogacar covered 13,667.1 kilometres (8,777.3 miles) in 328 hours, 24 minutes and 46 seconds over 84 stages. Vingegaard reportedly did it in 328 hours, 26 minutes and 11 seconds. As calculated, that’s a difference of 1 minute, 25 seconds. “We have to be careful to conclude that Pogacar was faster in the last four Tours; that would be wrong,” it said.

Read more below the photo.

There is a 3 (!) second difference between Vingegaard and Pogacar

This becomes even more evident when we consider that Pogacar collected a large number of bonus seconds during these Tour stages, totaling 199 seconds. Vingegaard gained 111 seconds. That’s 3 minutes 19 seconds against 1 minute 51 seconds, a difference of 1 minute 28 seconds. So, if we exclude the bonus seconds and compare the pure race times of both drivers, a strange result emerges: Vingegaard was 3 seconds (!) faster than his Slovenian rival in the four editions. Pogacar’s time was 328 hours 28 minutes 2 seconds, compared to Vingegaard’s 328 hours 28 minutes 5 seconds.

Interestingly, Pogacar earned substitute minutes in 2021 and 2024, while Vingegaard did the same in 2022 and 2023. But it’s clear how evenly matched the two are.