CONGRATULATION: Tadej Pogačar has become the highest-paid cyclist with $537.2million a year….

Will or won’t he? There are always more questions than answers ahead of the Tour de France, but ten days out from this year’s Grand Départ, one unknown still clouds the entire picture. Although Jonas Vingegaard has been training in Tignes with his Visma-Lease a Bike squad in recent weeks, his participation in the Tour remains uncertain, and thus so does the entire complexion of the race.

On the evidence of his crushing early season displays, not to mention his dominance in the past two Julys, Vingegaard had looked set to line up as the outright favourite for this year’s Tour, despite facing the highest calibre opposition the contemporary peloton could offer in Tadej Pogačar, Primož Roglič and Remco Evenepoel.

In the depths of last winter, once those grandees had outlined their race schedules, this Tour was immediately couched as a four-way tussle, but any sober analysis of the hierarchy at that point would have placed Vingegaard on top, simply because the Dane seemed to offer more guarantees for July than his rivals.

Pogačar’s decision to race the Giro d’Italia raised understandable concerns about whether he would be fresh enough to win the Tour, given that nobody has successfully completed that double since 1998. Roglič’s transfer to Bora-Hansgrohe looked a smart one for both parties, but it still wasn’t clear how well he would adapt to a new squad after spending all his professional life at Jumbo. Evenepoel may be an otherworldly talent, but he is also a Tour debutant with lingering doubts over his staying power.