'I don't think I'm a cannibal like Merckx' - Tadej Pogacar and the road ahead

Like many professional riders, Tadej Pogačar is in an off-season limbo. His 2023 campaign ended with a third consecutive victory at Il Lombardia and he has recently enjoyed a few days holiday, yet on Sunday he will ride the Singapore Tour de France criterium and the subsequent Saitama criterium in Japan.

2023 already seems in the past, already described as ‘last season’, while 2024 and the next season is already on the horizon.

The routes of the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France have been revealed and suggestions of Pogačar going for the Giro-Tour double are circulating, even if the Slovenian and UAE Team Emirates have still to confirm and perhaps even decide his major goals. 

“For sure the main goal in 2024 will be the Tour de France,” Pogačar makes clear in an interview with Cyclingnews and La Gazzetta dello Sport, but with a caveat.

“I need to look at the whole picture and decide what I really want to achieve and what I’m capable of achieving.

“It’s more of a mental decision than a performance-based decision. The organisation of it all is important. Even if you just ride the Tour de France, the organisation and planning needs to be perfect so that you can train 100%, recover 100% and then race at 100%. If you don’t have the time to do all that, then it’s not worth it. That’s an especially important factor if you want to do two Grand Tours in the same season. 

“For sure I’d have to give up some other races to ride both the Giro and Tour and I love racing the Classics, so it’s going to be a tough decision.”

No one has completed the Giro-Tour double since Marco Pantani in 1998. Chris Froome won the 2018 Giro d’Italia and was third at the Tour de France, while Tom Dumoulin was second in both races in the same year.

Pogačar is widely considered the most likely candidate to emulate Pantani. He is the best rider of his generation, Merckxian in the way he wins so much each season and in different races, and so perhaps the rider most equipped to take on the Giro-Tour double.

“I don’t eat people… I don’t think I’m a cannibal like Merckx,” Pogačar suggests, keen to portray himself in a more human, less competitive nature.   

Pogačar won 17 races in 2023 and he again topped the individual UCI rankings by a massive amount ahead of Jonas Vigegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič. He won Paris-Nice, the Tour of Flanders, the Amstel Gold Race and Flèche Wallonne during a long spring run of success before he fractured his wrist in a crash at Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

He spent several weeks off the bike in May, disrupting his Tour de France preparation but he still tried to take on Vingegaard, Jumbo-Visma and everyone else in France. He famously cracked in the Alps but fought back to win stage 20 and finish second overall in Paris.

Pogačar was also third in the aggressive and selective World Championships in Glasgow, won by Mathieu van der Poel, and he ended his season with a third consecutive Il Lombardia victory. His tally of points also helped UAE Team Emirates top the UCI team rankings ahead of Jumbo-Visma for the first time.

It was another huge haul, yet Pogačar insists he doesn’t measure his success by the points scored or the wins totted up. He wouldn’t swap all his 2023 results for victory in the Tour de France.

“There’s only one thing I’d change: my crash at Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Without my fractured wrist, my season would have been perfect,” he said a few weeks ago, and he revisits the idea now.

“For me a successful season is if I feel good from February to October. So far, every season has been successful, and I hope that continues, but I don’t race just for the results, just like the cycling season isn’t only about the Tour de France. I like the challenge of racing. I like to go for different races and mix things up. If you focus on one race, things can go wrong. I learnt that this year.” 

Pogačar now understands that his 2023 Tour de France ‘went wrong’ the moment he fractured his wrist at Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

He was forced to take an extra three weeks off the bike and was unable to lay firm foundations for his Tour preparation, instead building his challenge on the sand of sessions on the home trainer and a compact few weeks of altitude training and mountain reconnaissance.

Pogačar bravely tried to take on Vingegaard in July, but he lost 1:38 to the Dane in the stage 16 time trial and then cracked the day after on the mighty Col de la Loze.

“I'm gone. I’m dead,” he famously said over race radio, before losing six minutes to Vingegaard and any chance of overall victory.

“I started the Tour ready to fight from day one and we did a good job until I cracked. The truth is that I wasn’t ready for three weeks of Grand Tour racing,” Pogačar admits now. 

“It wasn’t easy to take on the Tour after fracturing my wrist. It was a complicated fracture and operation, and that affected my preparation for the Tour.”

“I could have hoped for more, but I’m also satisfied. I suffered a lot in that final week of the Tour; I suffered in the time trial, I obviously suffered that day and in the days afterwards. The guys in the team and my friends in the peloton encouraged me and gave me the motivation to go for stage 20.

“To finish second overall, to win the white jersey again and to win two stages, especially stage 20 after I’d suffered a few days earlier, I think was pretty good.” 

The hilly time trial between Passy and Combloux was the turning point of the 2023 Tour. Vingegaard admitted it was one of the best days ever on the bike as he pushed beyond his usual power numbers, gaining 1:38 on Pogačar and more than three minutes on the other overall contenders to set up his second consecutive victory in Paris. 

By contrast, Pogačar struggled to limit his losses. He opted for a bike change before the climb to the finish, losing further time to Vingegaard.

“I simply didn't have the best day. I was perhaps already a little fatigued,” Pogačar explains, looking back to the fateful day. 

“I think that in the best-case scenario, I could have gone 40 seconds faster, but not more. When I look at all the calculations and reflect on the bike change, I’m convinced that it didn’t make a difference to my performance. I’d have lost the time trial anyway, if I was healthy or not. It is what it is.”

Pogačar was in Abu Dhabi last week with several UAE Team Emirates teammates to meet sponsors and local fans, and to begin planning for next season.

Although their full race programmes have yet to be decided, it seems certain that Pogačar will clash with Vingegaard, Roglič and Evenepoel at the Tour de France. Pogačar and Vingegaard have two victories apiece, while Roglič is hungry to complete his Grand Tour palmarès after his move to Bora-Hansgrohe and Evenepoel is ambitious as ever for his Tour debut. 

“It’ll be a kind of Royal Rumble,” Pogačar jokes, comparing the showdown to a big-ticket WWE wrestling match.  “I’ll try to do my own thing in 2024 and we’ll see who is up there too.”

In another change, Pogačar turned 25 on September 21 and so can no longer compete for the best young rider’s white jersey at the 2024 Tour de France. He has won the white jersey for four consecutive years and worn it for 75 days. It is the end of an era in Pogačar’s pro career, which began in 2019.

He is no longer the promising young prodigy of the sport but is convinced he can continue to improve in 2024 and beyond, his career arc still curving upwards.   

“So far, I think I’ve improved every year. I hope I’m still improving,” he says.  “Of course, I'm getting older and for sure one day I’m not going to improve anymore. I just hope to stay at my peak and then slowly go down. I think I can be okay for a few more years…”