The Contenders for the White Jersey at the 2023 Tour de France

The Tour de France began awarding a white jersey in 1968 to the young rider who had the best combined placing on the General Classification, the Points Classification, and the Mountains Classification, but in 1975 the maillot blanc, as it’s also known, began being awarded to the highest-placed rider (on the Tour’s General Classification) under the age of 26.

While the classification remained, the jersey itself disappeared from 1989 to 1999, but it returned in 2000. France’s Laurent Fignon (1983), Germany’s Jan Ulrich (1997), Spain’s Alberto Contador (2007), Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck (2010), Colombia’s Egan Bernal (2019) and Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar (2020 and 2021) are the only riders to win both the General Classification and the Best Young Rider Classification in the same Tour.

So here’s a rundown of the 2023 white jersey contenders–and some other young riders looking to make an impact on this year’s Tour.

The Defending Champion

Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates)

Pogačar has won the white jersey three years in a row now, and there’s no reason why he won’t win a fourth–which would be a new record since the classification was established back in 1975.

There’s little the 24-year-old can’t do on a bike, and barring a crash, illness, or some other act of the cycling gods, he should run away with the title again.

The Challengers

Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek)

One of hottest young riders in the sport, Denmark’s Mattias Skjelmose comes to the Tour fresh-off winning the Tour de Suisse, holding-off Spain’s Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) and Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quick Step) to take the biggest win of his career.

He then continued his winning streak by winning the road race at the Danish National Championships this past weekend. He’s known as more of a climber, but he’s developing as a time trialist: he finished third in the final ITT in Switzerland and was second in the event at the Danish championships. His team will likely take things slowly when it comes to the 22-year-old, but he’ll have lots of chances to ride for stage wins and a possible top-10 finish overall.

Felix Gall (AG2R Citroën)

After finishing second on Stage 3 and winning Stage 4, Austria’s Felix Gall took the lead at the Tour de Suisse for a day before handing the jersey to Skjelmose after Stage 5. And were it not for an absolutely terrible performance in the final ITT (in which he lost over three minutes to the other contenders) he might have finished on the podium.

Nonetheless, his performance put him on the radar, and maybe he should have been there already considering the string of top-10 GC finishes he’s scored since the start of season, including tenth overall at the Tour of the Basque Country and ninth overall at the Tour of the Alps.

He comes to the Tour in support of Australia’s Ben O’Connor, his team’s GC captain and a former fourth-place finisher at the French grand tour. But assuming he gets a chance or two to ride for himself, he could win a stage.

Carlos Rodríguez (INEOS Grenadiers)

The INEOS Grenadiers are bringing several riders to this year’s Tour with the talent to score a high GC finish, and of them, Spain’s Carlos Rodríguez is the rider we’re most excited to see. The 22-year-old showed his chops with an eighth-place finish in last year’s Vuelta a España, his first grand tour.

Prior to that he won the road race at the 2022 Spanish National Championships (which always boasts one of the deepest fields of any nation) and finished second at the 2021 Tour de l’Avenir, a race that’s essentially a “baby” Tour de France and is only open to riders aged 19 to 23. He’s yet to be given his team’s undivided support in a grand tour, but with another strong ride, INEOS might not be able to hold him back any longer.

Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Pro Cycling Team)

The Tour de l'Avenir is a prestigious event. Laurent Fignon, Greg Lemond, Miguel Indurain, Egan Bernal, and Tadej Pogačar all won the event earlier in their careers, and they all went on to win the Tour de France. Norway’s Tobias Halland Johannessen defeated Rodríguez to win the race by 7 seconds in 2021, hanging tough after Rodriguez won the final stage by almost two minutes.

Now the Norwegian gets a chance to ride the Tour de France as the GC captain of Uno-X, a Norwegian-Danish wild card team who earned its way into this year’s Tour after a solid string of results last year, including Johannessen’s tenth-place finish at the Critérium du Dauphiné. He’s probably a year or two away from being a true GC challenger, but this is an era in which riders don’t need much time to live up to their potential.

Thomas Pidcock (INEOS Grenadiers)

Great Britain’s Tom Pidcock is a star of multiple disciplines who’s still figuring out what kind of rider he wants to be. And after making his Tour debut last year and winning Stage 12 atop Alpe d’Huez, INEOS wants to see if the 23-year-old has what it takes to be a GC contender.

On paper, it looks like a possibility: Pidcock finished 16th overall last year, and won the “baby” Giro d’Italia in 2020. The only thing working against Pidcock’s chances this year is the fact that INEOS seems to be throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, with Colombians Egan Bernal (who won the Tour in 2019) and Daniel Martinez (who helped Bernal win the Giro in 2021) joining Rodriguez and Pidcock as riders capable of pulling-off a high finish. At the minimum, we see him winning another stage–especially in a Tour as mountainous as this year’s–and at best, he blossoms into the GC rider INEOS hopes he can be.

Matteo Jorgenson (Movistar)

American Matteo Jorgenson has really blossomed this year, winning the Tour of Oman in February and then finishing eighth at Paris-Nice, ninth at the Tour of Flanders, and then second at the Tour of Romandie.

And while we were hoping for bigger things from the 23-year-old at the Critérium du Dauphiné (he finished 63rd), we’re still expecting to see him pick up right where he left off at the end of last year’s Tour: fighting for stage wins Tour while helping his team’s captain, Spain’s Enric Mas, to a high GC finish. Rumored to be heading to Jumbo-Visma next season, Jorgenson looks like a bona fide star in the making.

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