Form ranking: Tour de France 2019 favourites – June

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Chris Froome (Team Sky) leads on the Alpe d'Huez(Image credit: Getty Images)

With the Tour de France now just a month away, Cyclingnews takes an updated look at how the favourites are looking ahead of the start of the race in Brussels, Belgium, on July 6.

Poor Jakob Fuglsang must have been beginning to think that it just wasn't going to be his season after he first stood on the final podium having taken third overall at the Itzulia Basque Country in April, only to be knocked down to fourth place once the race jury decided to reinstate Bora-Hansgrohe's Emanuel Buchmann, who'd taken a wrong turning at the end of the stage, while fighting to save his third place from the Dane.

There followed the controversy at Amstel Gold, where Fuglsang and the rider fast becoming his bête noire, Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep), attacked together in the closing stages of the race, only for Fuglsang to be told by his team car to stop working in order to save himself for the sprint, when in reality the chasing group was breathing down their necks, and the win went to a fast-finishing Mathieu van der Poel (Corendon-Circus), with Fuglsang clinging on for third in what has surely been the race of the season so far, excitement-wise.

Swiftly getting over the disappointment of having been pipped at the post by Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) on the final-day time trial at Tirreno-Adriatico by a single second, Adam took a stage win ahead of Sky's Egan Bernal and Dan Martin (UAE Team Emirates) at the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya from a group sprint on the summit of Vallter 2000, and finished second overall there to Astana's Miguel Angel Lopez. Yates then scored another stage win on the final stage of the Itzulia Basque Country in Eibar ahead of Martin and Jakob Fuglsang (Astana), which netted him a fifth-place finish on the GC.

Overview: After extended celebrations and media/sponsorship commitments in the aftermath of his Tour de France victory last year, Geraint Thomas had something of a sluggish start to the season. However, despite the Tour of the Basque Country in April following in the same anonymous tone as his early races, there was something of a turnaround at the Tour de Romandie last month. Thomas finished third overall, placing fifth in the opening prologue and 10th in the concluding time trial, as well as third on the summit finish at Torgon.

Overview: Most of the talk surrounding Nairo Quintana recently has been transfer-related, with a move to second-division French outfit Arkea-Samsic on the cards. When it comes to racing, his last appearance was the GP Miguel Indurain on April 6, where he placed 42nd. Prior to that, he produced a solid enough performance at the Volta a Catalunya, finishing fourth, but behind compatriots Miguel Angel Lopez (Astana) and Egan Bernal (Ineos).

Overview: Still no success for the four-time Tour de France champion this season, but there have been signs that Chris Froome is moving in the right direction. He was prominent in helping his younger teammates Pavel Sivakov and Tao Geoghegan Hart to the top two steps of the podium at the Tour of the Alps, and also put in a shift at the Tour de Yorkshire, where his teammate Chris Lawless was victorious.

Froome was well down this list the last time we published it, and he has admitted to being "a bit eager" and to having done "too much" in terms of training at the start of the season. However, he has now backed up the Tour of the Alps and Yorkshire with a long stint of altitude training in Tenerife with the core of Ineos's Tour squad and now heads to the Critérium du Dauphiné to step things up a notch and go for a result himself at a race he has won three times.

Bernal had been enjoying a dream season in 2019, and, after taking third overall at the Volta a Catalunya in March, woulda, shoulda, coulda won the Giro were it not for his training crash, which left the 22-year-old with a broken collarbone just a week before he was set to lead the team at the year's first Grand Tour. It all leaves Ineos with a bit of a dilemma, although no doubt any questions about how it might work on the eve of the race will be batted away by a cover-all "the road will decide".

Overview: The Italian finished runner-up at the Giro d'Italia, which clearly proves he's in top form, but also raises the question of how he can repeat it in July. Both the Giro and Tour have been on Vincenzo Nibali's schedule since the start of the season, and while he appeared to dismiss the idea of targeting the overall classification – floating the idea of stage wins and even the mountains classification – he did so only tentatively.

The 29-year-old had to put a bit of a lid on his own ambitions at the Giro once it became clear that Movistar teammate Richard Carapaz was in a position to win the title. But that may yet prove to be a blessing in disguise, as while Landa proved that he was back on track and back to being close to his best, his team duties may have helped to keep something of a lid on things, leaving him ready to fire on all cylinders come July.

Few of the other Tour contenders even raced beyond April's Ardennes Classics, after which many knuckled down to altitude training camps, but Kruijswijk did both. A training camp in Spain's Sierra Nevada mountains after Romandie in the company of the team's young star Wout van Aert should mean that Kruijswijk will be one to watch at the Dauphiné next week, and then again at the Tour de France with his team's full support.

Overview: Like many of the other Tour de France contenders, Romain Bardet's last race was Liège-Bastogne-Liège, where the Frenchman finished a relatively disappointing 21st after taking a podium spot a year earlier. The 28-year-old loves to race, and so the lay-off since then would have had him twiddling his fingers, and no doubt giving it full beans during his recent – and annual – altitude training camp in Spain's Sierra Nevada mountains, where he was joined by a number of the teammates likely to support him at the Tour.

While his Catalunya performance was nothing to write home about, Porte showed signs of a revival in California in May, racing to fourth place on the race's penultimate stage to Mount Baldy – a climb not too dissimilar to the Australian's beloved Willunga Hill, which he's made his own for the past six seasons. A mechanical problem just as things got interesting on the upper slopes of Baldy would have prevented him from doing even better, but the signs were there.

Despite the Dutchman's podiums last year, no one has won both since 1998, and his early exit from the Giro should address the problem of how to overcome the fatigue of three weeks of racing and peak again in such a short space of time. Dumoulin left Italy after just four stages, all of it – barring the opening time trial – sat in a peloton. However, his recovery from that knock to the knee has been "slower than we hoped for", according to his team, and he recently underwent a cautionary MRI scan. So while he looks good in terms of fatigue, there are still many question marks surrounding his shape.

Overview: After a reasonable start to the season – fourth overall at the Volta a la Comunitat Valciana and seventh at the UAE Tour – Dan Martin continued his route to the Tour de France with a lowly 23rd overall at the Volta a Catalunya (although he did take third on the 'queen stage' behind Adam Yates and Egan Bernal), and then second overall at the Itzulia Basque Country behind Ion Izagirre (Astana) after just missing out on a win on the final stage.

Overview: The runner-up from the 2018 Vuelta a España has had a relatively quiet season so far. He followed up fourth overall at the Volta ao Algarve with ninth place overall at the Volta a Catalunya, where he did at least nab second place on the final stage, which was won by Bora-Hansgrohe's Davide Formolo. He then finished 11th overall at the Itzulia Basque Country in April before going on to unremarkable rides at the Ardennes Classics.

The Colombian's stage win and second place overall at the 2017 Tour seem like a long time ago now, and things are going to have to start going very right for the 32-year-old if he ever wants to reach such heady heights again. Urán's crash on the second stage of Paris-Nice set him back massively. Prior to that, he'd opened his season with a win in the team time trial at the Tour Colombia 2.1 on home soil, and finished the week-long stage race sixth overall. Things had looked promising.

After returning from his broken collarbone at the Tour of California, Urán eased himself back into racing by riding in the service of early race leader Tejay van Garderen and his young compatriot Sergio Higuita, who finished second in California in what was his first race with EF Education First and his first WorldTour event. That was the last time Urán raced – in mid-May – and it was unclear whether he would next race at the Critérium du Dauphiné or the Tour de Suisse, if either. He should probably really be doing both, were it not for the fact they overlap…

Patrick is a freelance sports writer and editor. He’s an NCTJ-accredited journalist with a bachelor’s degree in modern languages (French and Spanish). Patrick worked full-time at Cyclingnews for eight years between 2015 and 2023, latterly as Deputy Editor.