When Tadej Pogačar surged ahead of great rival Jonas Vingegaard at the top of the Col de la Couillole, clapping his chest and stretching out his arms as he crossed the finish line, it all but confirmed his return to the pinnacle of cycling in thrilling fashion.
Pogačar hadn’t needed to win the penultimate stage of this year’s Tour de France to secure a third yellow jersey, but the fact that he did – and the manner in which he did it – underlined his complete dominance over the past three weeks.
And it wasn’t just at this year’s Tour that Pogačar was at his brutal best. Weeks prior, he was victorious in the Giro d’Italia for the first time in his career, becoming the first man to win both races in the same year since Marco Pantani in 1998.
The rare double has been achieved by only eight riders in history, and Pogačar, a baby-faced 25-year-old from a small town in Slovenia, is the latest addition to that select club. Such success he never foresaw.
“When I was younger, I was never thinking that I can win a stage in the Tour de France,” Pogačar tells CNN Sport. “After I won the first Tour de France – because that’s an ultimate goal in cycling – everything is more or less a bonus.
“I’m just racing to have fun, not to feel that it’s obligatory or anything, and go with a free mind to races.”
Pogačar became the youngest cyclist in the post-World War II era to win the Tour when he stunned Primož Roglič four years ago, surpassing his compatriot in the penultimate stage of the race.
Another triumph, at times seeming more like a procession than a contest, came the following year, before Pogačar was twice beaten by Denmark’s Vingegaard, seemingly the only rider capable of challenging the Slovenian over a three-week-long race.
The pair have gone on to forge a fierce rivalry, and the 2024 edition of cycling’s most prestigious race was Pogačar’s chance to enact his revenge. He was ruthless in doing so, winning six stages in total, five of them in the mountains. Vingegaard, who was hospitalized after a serious crash back in April, battled valiantly but in vain.
The youngest rider to win the yellow jersey three times, Pogačar is fast closing in on the all-time record of five, jointly held by Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain. Lance Armstrong – who won seven consecutive Tours de France from 1999 to 2005 – received a lifetime ban from professional sport and was stripped of his titles in 2012 for doping offenses.
“I don’t like to talk about what can be in the future, what records can be broken,” says Pogačar. “But three now, three Tours de France and maybe 10 more years of my career if I’m well. So the odds are pretty good still to have five Tours de France, but that’s not the goal I want.”
Instead, Pogačar is plotting out his career one race at a time, carefully outlining which events he will target each year with his UAE Team Emirates outfit.
Unusually for a cyclist, his talent is such that he can win races of almost any length and on different terrains. That includes one-day classics, which require an explosivity normally sacrificed by Tour de France contenders in favor of endurance.
He says that he wants to win all five of cycling’s monuments – with only the Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix outstanding – and also to win all three Grand Tours by adding the Vuelta a España to his palmarès. Only one person, the legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx, has ever achieved this sweep and that was long before the modern era of cycling.
For Pogačar, these lofty goals seem achievable rather than laughable. Winning the red jersey of the Vuelta would see him become the eighth male cyclist to win all three of the Grand Tours, another rare accolade well within his reach.
As for this year, Pogačar admits that everything “fell into perfect place.” After winning the Tour, he decided to skip the Olympics due to fatigue, though later said that the Slovenian Olympic Committee’s surprising decision not to select his partner, Urška Žigart, also influenced the move.
He was back on the bike for the PlumeStrong Cycling Challenge in Switzerland at the start of September, a charity ride which aims to raise around $1.1 million (1 million euros) for humanitarian causes, including the development of 15 rural secondary schools in Sierra Leone.
Pogačar took part in the first leg of the ride from the Swiss city of Zürich to Venice in Italy. “It fits into my nature, cycling and raising money,” he says. “So for me, these kinds of events are really nice … just taking a small part in the challenge.”
The event was also a convenient way for Pogačar to prepare for the next big race in his calendar: the world road race championships, which begin in Zürich later this month.
Finishing third last year, no Slovenian has ever won the road race at the world championships, which takes the form of a mass-start event across a single day and allows the winner to wear the famous rainbow jersey throughout the following season.
A victory in Zürich would be further testament to the stunning breadth of Pogačar’s talent. It’s with good reason that he is so adored back home in Slovenia, where thousands of fans celebrated his return from the Tour de France by gathering in the streets of Ljubljana, the capital, and Komenda, his hometown of around 6,540 people.
“Both were kind of crazy,” Pogačar says of his homecoming. “It was so many people in both locations – I could not believe that so many people can come to my hometown. It was really, really nice to see. We have great fans in Slovenia and I’m so grateful for them and also for all the other fans when they come and cheer us on at the Tour de France.”
Talent alone hasn’t propelled Pogačar to cycling’s summit. He credits his team – “the planning and organization behind me” – for carefully structuring his calendar, and also rivals like Vingegaard, a more subdued and introverted presence in the peloton, for forcing him to raise his standards.
“Jonas came on top two times in the Tour de France, and this made me even hungrier for the Tour and gave me bigger motivation,” says Pogačar.
“I think all of us on the top teams and the top riders, we push each other to the limit. I think we all have good relationships between each other, but when it comes to competing, we always want to beat each other and just go another level.”
With Pogačar and Vingegaard both still in their prime with years of cycling ahead of them, it seems likely that their rivalry will run and run.
In that time, the effervescent Slovenian will no doubt continue his assault on the record books, his name more frequently mentioned alongside some of the sport’s greats. Whether he likes it or not, comparisons have already been drawn between Pogačar and Merckx, who won 11 Grand Tours in the 1960s and 70s and is universally regarded as the greatest cyclist of all time.
“I cannot compare myself to Eddy Merckx because that was not in my time,” says Pogačar. “It’s kind of flattering, but also at the same time, it can be annoying because you just want to be you; you want to do your own thing, do your own racing and go for your own history, not somebody else’s.”
As for Merckx? He said last year that Pogačar can “win everything” and called the young rider a “blessing” for cycling fans. Based on what we’ve witnessed of late, that’s an assessment with which few would disagree.
CNN’s Issy Ronald contributed to reporting.
