Choose a picture that sums up this Tour de France and it might be this one: Tadej Pogacar on the right, Jonas Vingegaard on the left, barely a tyre’s width between their front wheels as they sprinted for the finish line on Wednesday, with the Dane scraping home the winner.

Each great rivalry on the Tour has created its key image, and it may be that in years to come this ranks alongside Raymond Poulidor and Jacques Anquetil rubbing elbows on the Puy de Dôme, Fausto Coppi handing Gino Bartali a bottle of water – or was it the other way round? – and Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond crossing the line hand in hand at l’Alpe d’Huez. Or, for the connoisseurs, Hinault and the Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk in a unique escape to contest the finish on the Champs-Élysées in 1979.

Over the years, the great double acts have all made a deep mark on cycling’s consciousness. French bike racing has never got over Poulidor and Anquetil, whose rivalry reached its zenith 60 years and two days ago. The Italy of the 1940s and 50s was bitterly divided between the tifosi of Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. A single Tour de France, 1986, created a narrative of conflict between Hinault and Greg LeMond which remains a bone of contention to this day. In Belgium, the cold war between Eddy Merckx and Roger De Vlaeminck lasted for most of the early 1970s, centred on the great one-day Classics. This year, the sport is embracing what has the makings of the finest soap opera of them all: Pogacar and Vingegaard.

Whoever wears the final yellow jersey in Nice next Sunday, the 2024 race will go down in the history books as the fourth in succession in which the perky Slovenian and the lugubrious Dane went head to head, with the score standing at Denmark 2 Slovenia 1 as the Tour entered its final week.

The 2021 race saw Vingegaard emerge as the main challenger to Pogacar, although the young man from Jutland had started that Tour as a domestique to the then Jumbo-Visma leader, Primoz Roglic, taking over leadership after he faltered following one of his many crashes. Although Vingegaard attacked strongly on Mont Ventoux, at no time did he ever truly look like shaking Pogacar, who raced to his second overall title in succession.

2022 and 2023 were different, however, with Vingegaard coming to maturity with the support of a super-strong Jumbo-Visma team as Pogacar faltered twice, in 2022 due to Jumbo’s collective strength and in 2023 – arguably – due to a broken wrist sustained in late April, which slowed down his preparation.

This year, on the other hand, it has been Pogacar who has enjoyed the perfect run-in to the Tour, with Vingegaard’s form in doubt after his horrendous crash on 5 April. Pogacar gained an early advantage in week one, but this past week the momentum has gradually shifted the way of Vingegaard; it is anyone’s guess how it will end. This continuity – four Tours head to head – sets this rivalry apart, and has made it particularly condensed, made for the Netflix era. Poulidor and Anquetil are considered a great double act, but are remembered for just one epic Tour, 1964, when Poulidor actually managed to push his great rival to the limit.

In the other Tours they contested, 1962 and 1963, Poulidor was never in Anquetil’s league and while the rivalry was genuine – Anquetil would always do his best to make sure Poulidor lost whenever they were racing – it had a theatrical side, with both men fully aware that the dramatics added to their market value in the exhibition races which made up the bulk of their income.

The rivalry between LeMond and Hinault only ignited in the 1986 Tour, although the debate about that Tour goes on to this day. Zoetemelk and Hinault were rivals for three Tours, 1978-1980, producing a now largely forgotten drama fest in 1979. For duration, Pogacar v Vingegaard has a long way to run before it matches Coppi against Bartali, who were frenemies from 1939 to 1954. The pair are unlikely to descend to the levels of pettiness of the Italians, with attempts to nobble each others’ teammates, inspections of random bottles the other man had dropped in case they contained drugs, and one world championship, 1948, where the pair marked each other completely out of the race.

Otherwise, all the ingredients are there. Vingegaard and Pogacar are contrasting personalities, with divergent racing styles – the latter is more quixotic, more instinctive, while the former is more conservative, happier to hold back to wait for the moments which suit him most. Pogacar was a precocious young talent; Vingegaard took longer to emerge.

A week ago, their different approaches led to the biggest bone of contention of the 2024 Tour, when Vingegaard closely marked Pogacar over the gravel tracks of the Champagne region, with social media feeds bitterly divided over whether the Dane should have played his rival’s aggressive game as well. “Pogacar rides more on feel,” said the 1987 Tour winner, Stephen Roche. “His panache makes things tricky for him, against Vingegaard, who knows how to measure his racing, you can pay dearly for that.”

Hinault, no stranger to aggressive racing, appreciates the mind games the pair are playing – Pogacar trying to provoke Vingegaard into unnecessary efforts, the Dane calling his rival’s bluff – but, paradoxically, said he would adopt Vingegaard’s strategy. “I’d have sat and watched with a minute’s lead. He needs to provoke Vingegaard into attacking.” Barring unforeseen events, their soap opera will run at least to Nice next Sunday, with further episodes next year and beyond.