Tadej Pogačar eats brownies on the Tour de France rest day. He tells journalists this in his press conference before adding that he hopes he can get back to his hotel room soon to “chill and watch a movie”. This is the man who is leading the biggest bike race in the world, in a sport that is obsessed with marginal gains and searching for incremental improvements. On last year’s rest day, the UAE Team Emirates rider could be seen dive-bombing into swimming pools. In many ways, it feels like Tadej Pogačar is just like us.
That is, of course, only if you discount what the Slovenian superstar can do on a bicycle. He currently leads the Tour by over three minutes with one week of racing to go after two demonstrative attacks on the weekend whereby he destroyed all of his general classification rivals. At the moment, Pogačar looks to have the Tour de France in the palm of his hand – if he can make it safely to Nice without any incident or huge blow-up, he’ll take home yellow. It is hard, at the moment, to believe that any other outcome is conceivable.
Often, when a rider runs away with a race like Pogačar has done so many times this year – think Strade Bianche, or Liège-Bastogne-Liège, or the Giro d’Italia – there’s a sense of frustration among cycling fans. It gets to a point where it becomes so obvious who is going to win that there’s a collective dislike of the rider who is dominating proceedings. The argument is that they ruin the intrigue and suspense in bike races. We still have one week of the Tour remaining, yet we know that Pogačar is very likely to take home yellow. Realistically, he’s making things predictable.
There is something that makes the 24-year-old somewhat immune to the eye-rolling and the laboured sighs when he keeps on winning, though. On stage 14 of the Tour de France, when Pogačar made his Pla d'Adet attack – which was in many ways the beginning of the end of this year’s real GC battle – I stood and watched the fans who lined the roadside on the iconic climb. Pogačar passed them all first, a flash of yellow emerging from the cliffs behind him, and the cheers were louder supporting him than for any rider who came afterwards. The Slovenian rider is bucking the trend of riders who are prolific winners being turned into the villain.
This is because Pogačar still seems human. His performances on the bicycle are out of this world, but he’s still partial to a sweet treat, or jumping in a swimming pool, or binge-watching Netflix. At the end of his press conference on Monday, the Slovenian rider laughed with journalists: “you’re the best guys,” he said after 15 minutes of fielding questions about what he expects from the next week of the Tour. It’s hard not to warm to the chatty, smiling guy in his mid-20s who is just having fun riding his bicycle.
Pogačar’s sense of humanity is also helped by the fact that he hasn’t always been so faultless when it comes to bike racing. His huge, catastrophic blow-up in last year’s Tour de France showed that Pogačar is flawed. He lost over seven minutes to Jonas Vingegaard in just two stages and took it on the chin. His response was sportsmanlike, respectful and it never seemed like the Slovenian rider fell out of love with the sport because of his defeat.
That spark that he consistently shows throughout the whole season comes with a visceral appreciation and passion for what he’s doing – this is something that all cyclists can relate to, whether you’re going on a Sunday spin to the cafe on local lanes or you are in the WorldTour peloton. Tadej Pogačar just enjoys racing. In turn, we all enjoy watching him.
