BOY KING

Tadej Pogacar turned the cycling world on its head with his dramatic last-ditch victory in the 2020 Tour the day before his 22nd birthday. Procycling looks at the meteoric rise of Slovenis'snew cycling hero

WRITER - Alasdair Fotheringham

Procycling UK - issue 274, November 2020

Primoz Roglic won’t want to hear it, but Tadej Pogacar didn’t initially want to take part in the Tour de France this year.

“I was talking to Tadej when the season was getting underway, and he wasn’t so interested in the Tour,” Joxean Fernandez Matxin, UAE Emirates DS, tells Procycling.

“He was much keener on doing the Giro this year and then the Tour the next. But I told him the best idea would be to do the Tour now, where with [Fabio] Amu as leader, he’d be able to learn what it’s like without any pressure.”

Matxin’s argument about learning without pressure proved far more successful than the veteran Basque director could have imagined, even if Pogacar’s ability to grasp the essential notions of grand tour racing at a speed that other, far more battlescarred pros, have never managed to master was already blindingly obvious to the cycling world in the Vuelta last year.

But what the world now wants to know is how Pogacar, at 21, riding his first ever Tour de France and second grand tour, managed in a single, spellbinding hour to transform a runner’s up spot seemingly set in stone into a devastating last-minute triumph. In 36.2 kilometres, Pogacar claimed his third stage, recaptured the King of the Mountains (and if we all felt a bit sorry for Roglic, spare a thought for Ineos Grenadiers rider Richard Carapaz, whose own chances of a stage win were sacrificed for a two-day spell in the polka-dot jersey), confirmed his lead in the white jersey of best young rider and, of course, took yellow. When he said afterwards, “My head’s going to explode,” he wasn’t the only one feeling that way. Sporting heists on this scale are rare.

We can’t just say either from the moment the route was published, that we always knew the final time trial on La Planche des Belles Filles would be critical. As often as not in grand tours, all they do is shake up the lower end of the podiuma bit (as indeed happened with Richie Porte and Miguel Ángel López). Nor could we credibly do some clever tea-leaf reading and say that Pogacar’s victory in the Slovenian National Championships time trial over Roglic in late June on a similar-ish course was an omen for two months later. Nor yet was this a case of Roglic losing a time trial, pure and simple - as happened in the third week of both the 2018 Tour and the 2019 Giro. A victory by 1:21 over as established aTT specialist as Tom Dumoulin, let alone Porte, Roglic and Wout van Aert, puts Pogacar in a league of his own.

So what happened? Probably, to go back to Matxin’s initial explanation, a large part of his success was due to there being no pre-race expectations. Speaking to Procycling the day before the time trial, Matxin said, “We wanted him to learn in this Tour. And he has learned a lot. In one sense, everything he’s managed to do beyond that is essentially icing on the cake - be it a second place, two stages, one or two classifications...”

That absence of pressure extended deep into the time trial. It wasn’t just that nobody batted an eyelid when Pogacar rode without a power meter, or that he spent Friday evening watching the mechanics build up a white bike for his parade into Paris. He already knew that even if he fell apart on the road to La Planche des Belles Filles, he had achieved enough.

“We'll see if I’m in yellow on Sunday, but even if it’s this UAE shirt on the Champs-Elysées, it will have been a good Tour for us,” he said on the second rest day.

Winning the Tour in a final time trial is not new - Cadel Evans did so against Andy Schleck in 2011. But Pogacar’s Tour time trial was different because he treated it with all the insouciance of a 21-year-old with nothing to lose, happy to flog himself into the ground merely for the hell of it. His effort in the opening kilometres, already gaining ground on Roglic, wasn’t a strategy - he couldn’t hear the times on the race radio because of the crowds, he said, and probably he wouldn’t have cared if he had. In a sense, the Planche des Belles Filles stage was his own personal celebration, 24 hours before Paris, of what he’d already achieved.

“I always go into TTs quite nervous because it’s a good discipline, I like it, fight with myself,” he said afterwards. Here was a chance any time triallist would seize with both hands: an opportunity on a wonderfully varied course to pound themselves into the ground in the greatest bike race on earth, watched by millions, with no pressure on results. What was not to like?

As for the actual result, after two weeks of a largely straightforward GC battle, whenever the tension mounted it had been very hard to see past the lines of yellow-andblack jerseys of Roglic’s killer wasps at the front of the pack. There had been a blaze of a white UAE jersey as Pogacar stomped off the front for a few kilometres in the Pyrenees, a flash of blue as López conquered the Col de ja Loze for Astana, a mass of navy jerseys when Ineos Grenadiers briefly rolled back the years in the echelons on stage 7. But suddenly ona single Saturday, Pogacar eclipsed them all.

“He’s a nice young man off the bike,” UAE’s Andrej Hauptman, widely seen as the ‘father’ of modern Slovenian cycling, told Cyclingnews.com after the race. “But on the bike, he’s a shark.”

DATA FREAK

Despite the all-consuming nature of Pogacar’s Tour challenge this September, his decision to opt for the Tour, rather than the Giro, was largely formed when there was no racing on the calendar at all.

Riding their home race of the UAE Tour, Pogacar and a large chunk of the team’s stage racers were forced to spend two weeks in an Abu Dhabi hotel in quarantine. “We saw, first-hand and on the ground, what could happen. We were already thinking that the Tour might not happen or what our options would be if it shifted,” Matxin says. “Tadej up to then had been thinking more about the Giro; he wasn’t so convinced the Tour was so good for him.”

But that changed, there and then. And Matxin’s reason for convincing Pogacar of the opposite was that the sooner he learned about the Tour for himself, the better. 

“The Tour is like crashing on a bike. It doesn’t matter how often people will tell you it’Il hurt, you don’t understand the pain until you’ve actually fallen off. It’s the difference between words and reality,” he says. 

“For example, the gap that opened when he lost time in the echelons on stage 7. In other races, he might have lost 10 seconds. But in the Tour, the slightest error or

incident is magnified. And you can only learn that first-hand.”

The final decision could not be made until May, when the Tour’s dates were confirmed. But UAE’s main process of hammering out the pros and cons of whether Pogacar should head to Italy or France for his next grand tour was made in circumstances where every angle of the choice could be studied and debated with no time pressure or planes to be caught, not to mention a minimum of external distractions.

Two other key factors had already been covered: whether Pogacar could handle the pressure of taking part in events in theory way beyond his depth of experience, and whether he would be able to take full advantage of flying under the radar to learn as much as possible.

As first revealed in an interview with Procycling last year - and repeated ad infinitum this summer in different media - Hauptman had had no doubts about Pogacar’s ability to punch above his weight ever since he witnessed ‘Tamu Pogi’ - little Pogi, as he is known - as a junior, lapping a field of Slovenian senior racers.

Then in 2019 from the Volta ao Algarve to the Vuelta a España, neither event he was also initially supposed to take part in, Pogacar had made it clear no challenge was too big for him. “If Tadej wants to race in the Tour next year as co-leader, he’ll have a lot of reasons to justify that,” Matxin said at the Vuelta’s finish in Madrid.

“When we did our first ever training camp [in 2019, when Pogacar turned pro], we planned out the next five years for him and in theory he was going to doa grand tour after a year or so,” he tells Procycling now.

“But after working so well for Diego Ulissi in the Tour Down Under, we put him in the Algarve and then in California and I told him, rather than the 28 days of racing we’d got planned for you in multiple events, we may put you in the Vuelta. No pressure, with Aru as leader, but simply to see.” At that point, although nobody knew it, the blueprint of using Aru as the main man and Pogacaras his foil that took him to the Tour in 2020 had already been created.

And once he got there? Another key, according to Matxin, is Pogacar’s ability to absorb data. “These days, almost all the races are available to watch, you have Strava and power meters, Training Peaks, wattage, calories, efforts and so on at everybody’s fingertips. That’s great, because if younger riders have a strong character, and they push themselves, then experience is no longer necessary.”

But if those resources are available across the board, Pogacar’s exceptional ability to master a steeper than usual learning curve is what enables him to stand out. “It’s one of those definitions that makes him a champion, being able to process that information fast enough to be able to convert the bad moments into normal ones and the normal moments into excellent ones.”

There was a moment in the Tour’s first week, on stage 7, when it seemed that Pogacar’s inexperience had ended up with him being on the wrong side of a split, and which produced the biggest dent in his GC bid up to that point. With 30km to go, when Ineos powered up the echelons, Pogacar ended up caught behind. But although he was able to limit the gap with two teammates — Jan Polanc and Marco Marcato - Matxin strongly denies that this represented some kind of wakeup call for the young Slovenian.

“You don’t see what happens because of the TV images, but when he punctures, there are two Bahrain-McLaren riders who fall in front of him and Landa’s also in difficulties. By the time Tadej gets back, the echelons were gone, there were roundabouts, crashes and the whole thing turns into a time loss. What happened, happened.”

Time bonuses aside, the only other point Pogacar was gapped by Roglic was on the Col de la Loze.

“In 21 days there are always moments when you don’t get it right or feel particularly special,” Matxin says. “But then he’s 21, he was riding at 2,000 metres. If that’s the first time that happened and all he lost was 15 seconds, that’s a result that absolutely gets 12 out of 10 marks for me.

“More than the stage wins, I think third on that stage was, up to then, his best result of the Tour.”

But in between, too, came a point where according to L'Équipe’s interview with researcher Frédéric Portoleau, while agreeing that both Roglic and Pogacar were superior to the rest of the field on the climbs, that there was a remarkable degree of homogeneity. “One performance stands out: Pogacar on the Peyresourde, where I estimated his power output to be 467 Watts on a climb timed at 24:35,” wrote Portoleau. Like on the Col de Marie-Blanque, Pas de Peyrol, Grand Colombier and La Planche des Belles Filles, Pogacar’s ascent of the Peyresourde was a record.

“He’s the strongest in the mountains,” Roglic himself recognised, which renders it even more surprising that he failed to chase Pogacar in the Pyrenees.

“You would have thought he’d realised it was a great opportunity to get some time on Bernal, if nothing else,” Sean Yates, the former Sky director, tells Procycling. “Not losing those 40 seconds might not have helped him in the final time trial, but it’d have reduced the pressure.”

Another key part of the jigsaw, that it seemed like nobody saw Pogacar coming - as Eddy Merckx pointed out scornfully - could be true up toa point, given his team, while impressive enough on the flat stages, had lost its two key mountain workers. Aru and Davide Formolo abandoned anda third, David de la Cruz, raced the entire event with a broken sacrum after hitting the deck in Nice.

While they backed him as best they could, even if Matxin’s claim that, “with our three top climbers in shape, they’d have been talking about the UAE train, not the Jumbo-Visma one” sounds somewhat exaggerated, the consequence was simple. Whenever the road steepened, the UAE team were no longer a factor. Except Pogacar.

But if Merckx’s scathing analysis of Jumbo-Visma’s failure to shake off Pogacar is partly justified, the other teams will have learned their lesson the hard way. Witha rider that strong and that versatile - his three stage wins were all taken in different scenarios or stage formats - there will be no granting the young Slovenian a second’s leeway in the future.

Can we compare him to another remarkably young Tour winner, Egan Bernal? “No, in my era we always compared them to Indurain and we’ve ended up screwing over an awful lot of good riders because they weren’t Miguel,” says Matxin.

“It’s the same as saying one person’s good looking or another is not: totally subjective. Tadej is Tadej, Egan is Egan. He’s a different kind of champion.” But he’s one the cycling world will have to get used to now - and fast.