Tadej Pogačar won second place at the Tour de France

The Tour de France is the biggest cycling race of the year.

This year was already its 109th edition, and the Dane Jonas Vingegaard stopped Tadej Pogačar from celebrating for the third year in a row.

Cycling is certainly one of the most popular sports in Slovenia. Thousands of fans cheered on the best in the sport live.

Before the start of the race all the fans wanted Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar to fight for the victory again.

The number and number two cyclists in the world were undisputed favourites before the start of the race. But in this sport things often do not go as expected.

Primož Roglič knows this well. In the 5th of the 21st stages, he crashed badly and later retired.

The 23-year-old Pogačar was decisively challenged in the battle for overall victory by Jonas Vingegaard, Roglic’s friend from the Jumbo-Visma team.

With exceptional team strength the Dane defeated the Slovenian champion, who had to admit defeat for the first time in his third appearance at the biggest race.

»Jonas surprised me a little. The entire Jumbo-Visma team was very strong, and everything came together for them. Jonas has really improved tremendously and deserves this win. But we’ll learn something from our mistakes and I can’t wait for next year,« admitted Pogačar, sportingly.

The other Slovenians also fought to the best of their ability for excellent results or to help their team.

Luka Mezgec, Jan Tratnik and Matej Mohorič also drew attention several times, and all successfully reached their destination in Paris.

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The original version of this article was published on July 25th.

English translation courtesy of JL Flanner, Total Slovenia News, an English language website with news from and about Slovenia.