Okay, Let's Be Real: Can Matteo Jorgenson Win the Tour de France?

I'm serious.

Photo Credit: Billy Ceusters, ASO

On Sunday, Matteo Jorgenson came within eight seconds of winning the Critérium du Dauphiné. Ineos put in a big move on the final climb in order to set up Carlos Rodríguez for the win, and while Jorgenson was able to follow, race leader Primož Roglič was not. Jorgenson hauled Rodríguez up the Plateau des Glières and the two worked together under the understanding that Jorgenson would let the Spaniard have the stage win if the two worked together well enough to put serious time into Roglič.

Roglič juuuust barely hung on, just like he did in the final competitive stage of the 2020 Vuelta, but the sight of Jorgenson riding away with a little bitty climber and dropping a four-time Grand Tour winner was provocative. Jorgenson came within eight seconds of sweeping the two biggest French stage races outside the Tour de France itself. In the 21st Century, only two riders—Bradley Wiggins in 2012 and Roglič in 2022—have done the Paris-Nice/Dauphiné double.

I came into this season unsure of what to make of Jorgenson, who’d been competitive across all kinds of terrain but whose only professional victories had come against iffy competition at the Tour of Oman.¹ Watching him this spring at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Dwars Door Vlaanderen and the Tour of Flanders, I thought I’d finally pegged him as kind of a tweener classics specialist, someone big and powerful enough to hang on the cobbles but also light enough on his feet to get over big mountains. Maybe a rich man’s Neilson Powless or a poor man’s Michał Kwiatkowski.

Then he won Paris-Nice, and stayed glued to Remco Evenepoel over hill and dale in order to take it home. And after a Dauphiné time trial where—despite losing over a minute to Remco—he finished fourth, I don’t even know anymore. I’m trying not to hope too much.

I still look at Jorgenson, all 6-foot-3 of him, and can’t bring myself to believe. It’s a lot of body to haul up Mont Ventoux; the recent Tour de France winners who come in at that size are all a few years in the past now, for starters, but they had the benefit of the Sky/Ineos train and world-class time trial ability: Wiggins, Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas. Against Roglič and Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard², I don’t know if Jorgenson can hang for three weeks.

But at some point, this pessimism crossed over from guarded to irrational. Sticking with Remco, Vingegaard, and the Slovenians over three weeks is a massive bar to clear, so let’s be more realistic. Could Jorgenson podium a grand tour? Why not?

I imagine this audience is split into two camps: Cycling diehards and cycling newcomers who followed me here from my writing about baseball and other sports. So I’m going to say something that’ll make that pessimism click for the first group but will need some explaining for the second.

I started following cycling in the early 2010s, and when I started to get into the sport, my guy was Tejay van Garderen.

Tejay was the first real American GC rider to come through after U.S. Postal went down in a cacophony of broken beakers and torn blood bags. In 2011, he supported Cadel Evans’ successful bid for Tour de France victory. The following year, van Garderen supplanted Evans as the leader of Team BMC, finishing fifth and winning the best young rider classification. He’d repeat that fifth-place finish two years later and spend the rest of the 2010s making me tear my hair out.

Photo Credit: Alex Broadway, ASO

I want to be clear: I loved Tejay van Garderen. I was a huge Tejay van Garderen fan. Cycling, I learned years later, has a different³ fan culture than American team sports, where allegiance to riders is kind of squishy. I didn’t know that. I was wearing my following-the-Sixers-through-The Process goggles while watching My Guy finish ninth at the Tour of California.

Van Garderen was good enough to hang with Froome on some climbs and time trials, but never good enough to really threaten him. And every once in a while, he’d just hit a wall and chuck it all away. Watching Christophe Riblon catch and pass him on Alpe d’Huez in 2013 was too hearbreaking to bear. Then there was the third-week DNF from third place at the Tour in 2015, and the Tour of California collapses in 2018 and 2019, and I just kept on hoping, listening to the tiny voice that thought “maybe this time it’ll be different.”

When it comes to American cycling, I think being a Tejay van Garderen fan was genuinely traumatic. At least in this extremely narrow definition. I want to believe in Matteo Jorgenson but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s going to take something spectacular to make me optimistic about an American man contending at a grand tour—something like Sepp Kuss realizing he had the Vuelta in the bag only after everyone apart from his own teammates being out of contention.

So I did what I do at work when I feel lost: I made an enormous spreadsheet. I went to ProCyclingStats and looked up the podium finishers from the seven races I identified as the major European World Tour stage races: Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, the Volta a Catalunya, Itzulia Basque Country, the Tour de Romandie, the Dauphiné, and the Tour de Suisse.

I don’t know if this is the absolute top end of the one-week stage racing calendar—I’m sure there were years where the Tour of California or UAE Tour or some .Pro race was more challenging—but this list is in the ballpark.

I started in 2012, which was the year Wiggins won the Tour de France, kicking off this era of stage racing. Or maybe the second-most-recent era, if you want to count the Anglo-Sky era and the Roglič-Pogačar-Vingegaard era as separate generations. Again, you gotta cut it off somewhere.

Over the past 13 seasons, with the Tour de Suisse result still pending, 40 different riders have won one of these seven races. Eighty-seven have finished on the podium. Jorgenson is on both lists.

Since 2012, 20 riders who have finished on the podium in one of these seven one-week races have won a grand tour. Only three—Kuss, Ryder Hesjedal, and Fabio Aru—have won a grand tour in this period without podiuming a one-week race.⁴ And as many times as I’ve lived through a Van Garderen Week Three Incident, there isn’t as much falloff as you’d think the longer a race goes. Certainly not if you lower the bar to a rider contending at a grand tour only once.

Of these 87 riders, 41 have podiumed a grand tour. A further 13 (54 total) have finished in the top five, and 12 more beyond that (66 total) have finished in the top 10.

And that includes riders who were mostly career-long domestiques or stage hunters in the grand tour, and even a few classics specialists who managed to hang in the mountains for a couple days. Tirreno-Adriatico in 2016 ended in a Greg van Avermaet-Peter Sagan 1-2, for instance.

So of the 21 riders who podiumed a one-week stage race but never finished in the top 10 in a grand tour, six have won a monument, a world championship, or an Olympic title. (Or in the case of Sagan, van Avermaet, and Kwiatkowski, two of the three.) The other 15 includes mostly a mix of classics riders who haven’t won a monument (Tiesj Benoot among them) and riders at the start of their careers (Jorgenson, Mattias Skjelmose, Derek Gee, Florian Lipowitz, Brandon McNulty).

Overall, 34 of the 87 one-week podium finishers have won a grand tour, a monument, a world road race or time trial championship, or an Olympic gold medal. That’s not a bad percentage, if we’re projecting forward on a 24-year-old’s career.

But Jorgenson hasn’t just podiumed one stray one-week race. He podiumed three and won one of them. He almost won two in three months. What happens if we narrow the parameters?

Those 40 one-week race winners include 13 grand tour GC winners, pus eight more who have finished on the podium without winning. There are 27 riders who have matched Jorgenson’s one-week stage racing haul since 2012—one win and three podiums. That list includes 11 grand tour winners, 16 podium finishers, and only five riders—including Jorgenson—who have never finished in the top 10 at a grand tour.

The other four are Kwiatkowaki, Rui Costa, Sergio Higuita, and the surprise on the list, Simon Špilak. Špilak won the Tour de Suisse twice, plus the Tour de Romandie once outside the scope of my search, and finished on the podium in four other major one-week races.

Špilak only entered five grand tours in his career, only finished three—none after 2011—and never finished better than 48th. Apparently he hated racing in the heat⁵ and just never gave a shit about the Tour or the Vuelta as a result. What a legend.

It’s also worth remembering that Jorgenson is only 24. His one-week win and three podiums have come in the past 14 months, and there’s presumably more to come. Here’s a year-by-year list of riders who have two more more top-two finishes in these races in a single calendar year.

• 2012: Bradley Wiggins and Samuel Sánchez

• 2013: Chris Froome and Richie Porte

• 2014: Alberto Contador and Rui Costa

• 2015: Porte and Simon Špilak

• 2016: Contador and Nairo Quintana

• 2017: Alejandro Valverde, Contador and Porte

• 2018: Primož Roglič

• 2019: Roglič, Egan Bernal and Adam Yates

• 2020: None

• 2021: Porte

• 2022: Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard

• 2023: Roglič and Vingegaard

• 2024: Jorgenson and Juan Ayuso

In 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2019 (twice), and 2023, someone from the above list went on to win a grand tour that very year. We don’t know what Jorgenson’s ultimate potential is, but in recent years, riders who can do what he’s done either win monuments or contend for grand tours.

Let’s say Vingegaard can’t get back to full fitness in time for the Tour. Why wouldn’t Visma-Lease a Bike appoint Jorgenson as team leader? And why wouldn’t he then be able to make a serious attempt at winning the damn thing?

As I’ve said, it takes something special to make me optimistic about an American GC rider. This is something special.

1. And the final GC battle was decided by only one second anyway

2. Leaving aside the fact that if Vingegaard and Jorgenson start a stage race together anytime in the foreseeable future, Vingegaard will be Visma-Lease a Bike’s undisputed leader.

3. And much healthier, I’d argue

4. From now I’m going to use “one-week race” interchangeably with the seven races I’ve listed, just for the sake of flow. I think we can all accept that I’m not talking about the Tour of Qinghai Lake here.

5. Me too, dude