Ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, people will look back to the 111th edition of the Tour de France and mostly remember the performance of Slovenian phenom Tadej Pogačar. They’ll remember his insatiable need to win and those trademark mountainside attacks that made everyone else—the best climbers in the world, to be sure—look like they were standing still.

They might also remember, though less clearly, the history made in that Tour edition: Britain’s Sir Mark Cavendish finally breaking the all-time record for stage wins, Eritrean Biniam Girmay becoming the first Black racer ever to win a classification in a Grand Tour, Richard Carapaz as the first Ecuadorian to wear the Yellow Jersey and win a Tour de France stage.

They might remember the race’s second-place finisher. Perhaps only because he’d won the two previous Tours de France editions and, for a time, was the only person on Earth who could beat Pogačar in the French Grand Tour.

What history is far less likely to remember is that Vingegaard gave perhaps the most extraordinary performance in the Tour de France’s history. But as we know, history rarely remembers second place. And this, after all, was a bicycle race, and someone had to lose. And Vingegaard lost to a rider looking more and more like one of the greatest of all time.

But in losing to Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard still beat one-hundred-and-seventy-four of the world’s strongest bike racers. He beat João Almeida and Adam Yates and Carlos Rodríguez and Mikel Landa. He also beat Remco Evenepoel, a rider who might be in the pantheon of greats when his career is finally over. He beat Richard Carapaz, the King of the Mountains, up some of the biggest and more fearsome climbs in bike racing. Over the last three weeks, Vingegaard beat all but one man. And he was only six minutes and seventeen seconds behind him. And he did it a mere twelve weeks after a crash that hospitalised him for nearly two weeks.

It’s impossible to say what kind of shape the Dane was in when the Tour rolled out of Florence, Italy, on June 29—but missing that much training time ahead of what is widely regarded as one of the toughest challenges in all of sport took a massive toll.

We saw it all over his face in that first, atypically brutal week. We saw the pain streaked across Vingegaard’s cheeks with every climb. We saw him fighting to keep his shoulders relaxed, and his cadence normalised. But we saw him respond as best he could to everything Pogačar tried to throw at him. Sometimes, like at the end of his win on Stage 11, it worked. Most times, it didn’t.

In those final few Alpine days, which everyone eyed as Vingegaard’s last chance to attack, he simply stuck to the wheels on those in front of him, desperate to stay in second place. In that final mountain stage, when he heroically pulled Pogačar up the Col de la Couillole, past Carapaz, who was resplendent in head-to-toe polka dots, only to be dropped when Pogačar attacked, we saw a rider performing on pure instinct.

When we saw him heaped in a pile atop his handlebars moments after, fighting back tears as his wife, Trine Hansen, rushed to comfort him, we saw a bike racer completely drained of everything but emotion.

At that moment, with Hansen rubbing her husband’s back amid hordes of cameras shoved in their faces, we saw the culmination of arguably the greatest performance in Tour history. But history will likely forget this performance because history rarely remembers second place.

Toward the end of the Tour, when it was realised that the race was basically over, there was much talk about next year. The punditry bloviated about looking forward to a showdown between a world-beating Pogačar and a fully healthy Vingegaard in the 112th Tour de France. The conversation trudged on as if this year’s matchup was something of a wash. Meanwhile, one of the greatest performances in Tour de France history continued to unfold before our eyes. But it may have been easy to miss, considering it wasn’t that of the winner.

Many people say we’re lucky to be living in a time when Tadej Pogačar is racing, to be watching someone do things that no rider has been able to since the great Eddy Merckx. And I agree. We, as cycling fans, are so, so lucky. But we’re just as lucky to be watching a man like Jonas Vingegaard, who just beat one-hundred-and-seventy-four of the world’s greatest bike riders on little more than emotion, determination, and guts.

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