DESTINY’S CHILD

After the strongest spring of any defending Tour de France champion in four decades, Tadej Pogačar has every right to feel confident for July. He will start the 2021 race as the favourite, and he has looked imperious in most of his races. But what makes the young Slovenian tick?

Writer Alasdair Fotheringham

Procycling UK - Issue 283, July 2021

Two seasons have almost passed since a slight and sodden figure clad in the white, red and green of UAE Emirates pedalled his way past crunchy clumps of fallen hailstones from the afternoon’s thunderstorms in the high sierras of Andorra, en route to a breakthrough win in a grand tour. The first week of the 2019 Vuelta a España had been quiet for Tadej Pogacar, but on a short, intense stage when the race crossed the border for a 100km mountain trek through the Pyrenean principality, the young Slovenian crashed heavily in the freak rain and hail showers that battered the hour-long, 25km grind up to the summit finish of Cortal d’Encamp, and another promising young rider, Spain’s Marc Soler, had thrown a very public strop when instructed to wait for Movistar leader Alejandro Valverde. But with team-mate Fabio Aru clearly in decline, Pogacar had no-one above him in the UAE hierarchy to worry about and nothing to lose. So he soared away from a tiny group of favourites with two kilometres to go to a spectacular lone victory, on icy, waterlogged Andorran roads. He was, lest we forget, only 20, the youngest rider in that year’s Vuelta.

“He ignored my race orders,” recalls Matxin to Procycling. “I’d told him to wait to attack until the Valverde and Nairo Quintana groups had joined together so he could make the most of a likely moment of hesitation when they fused. But instead he timed it even better, attacking just a few seconds before they were about to come together, so they were caught on the back foot.

“It’s attitudes and actions like that that confirmed to me how much natural class he has as a rider. You can tell him what to do, but he knows it anyway, and better. He’s thinking, moving and acting like a winner.”

That bitterly cold day in Andorra also provided Pogacar’s usual victory celebration style its biggest audience to date: his arms slightly flung forward and wide in triumph, fists half-clenched, eyes opening as wide as possible, in seeming disbelief at his achievement.

And above all, as he went on to capture another two stage wins and third place overall in Madrid, in the 2019 Vuelta Pogacar made abundantly clear his capacity for seamlessly moving from one target onto the next without any stumbling or hesitation. There’s not just a certain style to his winning, in other words, there’s also substance.

Postwar Tour history saw one of its most dramatic, last-minute assaults on the yellow jersey last year, when Pogacar more than fulfilled the potential he had shown in the 2019 Vuelta by trouncing Roglic on La Planche des Belles Filles and taking a shock victory in the race. That turnaround, along with what Pogacar has achieved this spring, starting with victory in his first race, the UAE Tour, and with more wins by mid-May than any other rider at WorldTour level, has shown us, to its greatest extent yet, just how profound his talent is. Some riders win the Tour for the first time and have trouble following up the next season. This has not been the case with the 2020 champion.

Yet when you interview Pogacar, while the results speak for themselves, there are also plenty of indications why, on a personal level, he’s capable of racking up so many successes so fast, and handling the expectations building so fast around him as a result. He’s not especially talkative, but instead gives friendly, succinct, level-headed answers that do the job without ever getting wordy or tied up in knots. Certainly there’s never the whiff of a suggestion he could be a person who spends much time mulling over his spectacular progress or putting up barriers to protect himself from an overly inquisitive media, or for that matter, worrying too hard what kind of image he projects to the outside world. Rather than being theatrical or PR honed for interviews, it seems like he’s just telling it how it is.

“Last year I had a very high level of motivation because of those few months of no racing, so it was a good situation to go into races,” he explains to Procycling when asked why he’s opted to start the season so strongly. “And this year the UAE Tour is an important race for the team and for me, personally, I like the race. Also it was my first race of the season, and I always want to be in good shape at the start of the year, to get the ball rolling and go with that momentum into the next races.

“I’m still young and this is what I love to do, so I still have goals to achieve. I’m as motivated as ever. I can’t wait to go to each race and prove to myself I’m getting better, and race for the best results.”

It turns out Pogacar has always been a fan of another Tour winner with a fearsome reputation for being able to remain committed, even under the most challenging of circumstances: Chris Froome. Pogacar admires the multiple Tour winner on two fronts, he says: Froome’s enduring enthusiasm for the sport, and his aggressive, no-holdsbarred attitude to racing. He doesn’t forget, though, that Froome could be one of his obstacles en route to a repeat success in the Tour.

“I think it’s really nice that he’s still motivated. Obviously this sport is what he loves to do and if he’s enjoying these races and everything, for sure he will try to do his best,” Pogacar says. “I remember watching him on TV when I was younger. He was always quite a spectacular rider. I remember that stage in the 2018 Giro d’Italia” - when Froome attacked with 60 kilometres to go on the Finestre - “and, for sure, he saw an opportunity and went for it all out.”

Therein, Pogacar recognises, lies an affinity between the two and he even reminisces briefly about his most impressive long-range move to date, in the last mountain stage of the 2019 Vuelta en route to the sierras of the Plataforma de Gredos.

“I also like it when there’s an opportunity to attack,” he says. “Why not? We race from kilometre zero to the finish line in a stage, so it’s interesting for fans to see this kind of racing. If you know yourself, and know what’s coming in the next kilometres, you can go from far away if you are confident or have nothing to lose. But if you don’t try you never know. And I like to try.”

Pogacar’s relentless rolling of the dice with his attacks has seen him rack up one race win after another this year. Since the 2021 season began, the Slovenian has become the first reigning Tour de France champion to take a spring monument - Liège-Bastogne-Liège - since Bernard Hinault’s epic snowenshrouded victory in La Doyenne way back in 1980. Underlining that champion-level versatility, he’s also won  overall and a stage in Tirreno-Adriatico and the UAE Tour: three multi-day events, but in three radically different types of terrain. Following this spring, you could even say the most impressive element of his short but brilliant success story to date is not so much winning the Tour de France in 2020 as what he’s done after he won it.

For any other racer, and even more so in such a young rider, six wins of this calibre would already make 2021 a resounding triumph. But as he is the defending champion of the Tour, success or failure in July will always carry a disproportionately large significance for Pogacar.

However, quite apart from being the most difficult challenge professional cycling can offer, history shows us that taking two Tours is anything but straightforward. Not only that, should he stand in yellow on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday July 18, Pogacar would not just be the second rider in the last decade together with Chris Froome to win the Tour two years running. He would also be the first to win a first and second Tour in consecutive years since Miguel Indurain in 1991 and 1992.

Hinault. Froome. Indurain. The Slovenian is rubbing shoulders with some of the greatest names in the sport. After a 2021 early season of this calibre, it’s also clear that unlike many other grand tour winners suddenly pitched into the limelight with an unexpected win, and whose form is poleaxed by fame, fortune and the exponential increase in demands on their time, that hasn’t happened in Pogacar’s case. What rewards his having remained so focused during the off-season may reap him this summer is theoretically anybody’s guess, but after such a great spring, the omens could hardly be better.

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That the youngest Tour contender of 2021 is able to reach across the years to the oldest challenger and find points in common speaks volumes about Pogacar’s ambitions. But if the 22-year-old would like nothing more than to follow Froome’s wheeltracks and go from a single to multiple Tour wins this summer, the current predicament of another Tour winner, Egan Bernal, can’t be ignored, either.

Prior to January, Bernal’s extremely difficult 2020 season, culminating in him abandoning the Tour early, would surely have given even the most diehard of Pogacar fans food for thought. After all, in late July 2019, with the Tour, Paris-Nice and the Tour de Suisse all taken by the Colombian, it felt impossible to imagine Bernal and his all conquering Ineos squad not going on to dominate the race for decades. As Bernal knows too well, events played out very differently.

Pogacar’s 2021 season is already considerably better than anything the Colombian could do prior to his collapse on the Grand Colombière in last year’s Tour, although it has to be borne in mind that the pandemic and its effect on the calendar make it unwise to make too straight a comparison, and Bernal’s Giro ride showed he is now back to his best. What’s certain is that Bernal’s 2019 victory still lingers in the mind as being representative of the new generation sweeping in. And so, once again, we’re drawn back to the parallels with Pogacar.

Pogacar has no problem admitting Bernal’s Tour rollercoaster has crossed his mind, but he’s equally adamant that it’s not something that bothers him. “Everybody can get unlucky; we’re just human,” he says. “For now I’m riding like this and it’s all good, I’m healthy and everything is okay. Obviously I hope it will continue like this. But you never know what can happen.

“Defending a title is the hardest thing to do, but if you won a race before you can win it again.” Then he adds with a halfsmile: “Probably.”

But why is the Tour so difficult to win a second time in a row? “Because it’s the Tour and everybody is super-motivated. It’s a lot more stressful, and everybody has to be in good shape.” he says. “The riders make it the hardest race. So for sure it’s going to be hard to try and win it a second time.”

The Tour route, he recognises, is a very different one to 2020. “It’s very different, from day one to day 21. There are two flat time trials, so you have to train more on the TT bike, even if you lose some of your climbing ability. But you need to get that right before the race starts. Then we’ll adapt, improvise, go by day by day. I just hope I can arrive there in good shape, then we’ll see how we’re going.”

He’s equally phlegmatic about the consequences of no longer being able to fly under the radar or being underestimated, as he was by Jumbo-Visma last year. Rather, he just sees it as part of a much bigger game. “More riders will watch me. But that’s racing. I’m used to it. Sometimes you’re attacking, sometimes you’re defending. It’s fun, attacking. It’ll be good to do that in the Tour.” We’ve already seen that the Tour is far from being Pogacar’s only target in 2021. So it’s perhaps not surprising that he is already considering further goals for this season that could include the Olympics and the Vuelta.

“The Olympics is a really good course, really hard. But it’s also six days after the Tour, and there will be a lot of heat, humidity and jetlag. So it will be hard to do a good race, but we will go there with a good team. An Olympic medal would be a dream result, but achieving it is another thing.”

Rather than get overambitious, though, Pogacar has no plans to try and time his form, like Froome did when he took a double grand tour success in France and Spain in 2017, so that he would be strongest in the third week in the Tour and then try to carry that condition through to Japan and then onto the Vuelta.

“That’s also tricky to do. You never know when your top form comes,” Pogacar says. “The priority is the Tour and to be in the best shape there for three weeks, but it’s difficult to time it like that. The Tour is the Tour and then we’ll think about the Olympics and the Vuelta. I’ll keep going through the year and then we will see.”

So much has changed between the Tour in 2020 and the Tour in 2021 for Pogacar that you can’t help wondering how easy it’s been to adapt. But if you wanted an example of how effortlessly he seems to be handling being a star name of the sport, his point of view on how he’s now treated within the peloton offers some key insights.

“It’s still racing and sometimes somebody doesn’t let you past, no matter who you are,” he says. “But there’s always been a lot of respect between riders and teams and it’s always nice to let somebody past if you can. Me, I never had any problem with that,” he says, before making the kind of throwaway comment that only riders seemingly earmarked by the fates for greatness could make: “I always get to where I need to be.”

His rivals should take heed of the veiled warning, that there’s only one destination Pogacar has in mind.

ALASDAIR FOTHERINGHAM

2019

• As a neo pro, having signed for UAE Emirates, Pogačar wins his first GC title at the Volta ao Algarve. He wins stage 2 atop Mount Fóia, to take the leader’s jersey, which he then holds to the finish.
• Becomes the youngest person to win a WorldTour stage race at the Tour of California, aged 20 and 239 days. Beats Sergio Higuita, George Bennett and Richie Porte on Mount Baldy.
• Shows his time trial credentials to win the Slovenian National TT title for the first time, finishing ahead of Bahrain duo Matej Mohorič and Jan Tratnik by 29 and 45 seconds respectively.
• Completes a hat trick of stage wins at the Vuelta on his debut grand tour. The third is a solo victory after a 40km attack, on the penultimate stage, to win by 2:33 and move up to third on GC.

2020

• Dominates the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana, winning two of the five stages and the GC title. Beats Alejandro Valverde in the short uphill stage 2 sprint, then wins the mountainous stage 4.
• Gets his first Tour de France stage victory, on his debut, on stage 9 in the Pyrenees. Attacks on the descent to Laruns in a four-rider group, before beating Roglič in the sprint finish.
• Produces one of the biggest upsets in Tour history, overturning a 57-second deficit on the penultimate stage TT, to steal the yellow jersey. Becomes the youngest Tour winner since 1904.

2021

• Beats Wout van Aert to win Tirreno-Adriatico by 1:03, in a hard-fought week. Wins the race’s queen stage, and gains more time chasing Van der Poel on the lumpy stage 5 in torrential rain.
• Gets the better of compatriot Roglič to take the stage 3 victory at Itzulia Basque Country. The duo attacked each other on the climb to the line, with Pogačar winning by less than a bike length.
• Wins his first monument at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, also his first major oneday race, having finished third in 2020. Beats Alaphilippe, Valverde, Woods and Gaudu in the five-rider sprint.