Tadej Pogacar has delivered an alternative reality for the true believers
And for the first few seconds after Tadej Pogacar launches the solo attack that will win him the world championship, nobody can quite believe it. He’s going. “Suicide move,” Remco Evenepoel mutters to Mathieu van der Poel alongside him. “I didn’t even know he’d gone, to be honest,” Britain’s Oscar Onley would later recall. “Everyone’s thinking it’s too much,” said Ireland’s Ben Healy. There are more than 100km remaining in Zurich and the rational consensus in the peloton is that the world’s greatest cyclist has just blown his chance at the rainbow jersey.
He’s gone. And for all the puzzled faces he leaves in his wake, the shock and disbelief that will materialise when he rolls over the finish line in first place several hours later, perhaps the first thing to say about Pogacar’s gamechanging move was that it wasn’t quite planned, but it wasn’t quite unplanned either. For one thing, he had been corralling his remaining Slovenian teammates on the front for some time. Afterwards, his UAE Team Emirates colleague Tim Wellens revealed that the pair were recently on a training ride in Monaco where Pogacar confided his intention to attack early. “I thought he was joking,” Wellens admitted.
So first you have the tactical mind games, the theatre, the thespian flourish. But the moment itself: that comes from pure racing instinct. A little shift in the energy, the spidey sense that tells you your rivals are napping a little, and the breakaway group are beginning to cement their advantage, and now is the time, so go, just go. And the legs feel good, and the gap opens a little more easily than you were expecting, so you just keep going. Pogacar called his attack on Sunday “stupid”, but perhaps a better term for it is “mindless”: the state of flow that great athletes occasionally achieve in which their decisions are no longer entirely conscious or deliberate, where their body simply takes over.
So ends – with just Il Lombardia and a few other bits to come – one of the most remarkable seasons in the history of professional cycling. The great Eddy Merckx now believes Pogacar has surpassed him. Evenepoel puts it in even starker terms. “Tadej this year,” he said, “is not normal.” The Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, the rainbow jersey, Liège‑Bastogne‑Liège, Strade Bianche, 23 race wins in total. Beyond the bare statistics, that sense of sheer impregnability, the helplessness he engenders in his rivals, the conviction that he can win whenever he wants, however he wants.
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