18 December 19, 2021The Sunday TimesCycling
always fight until the last day, even
when we think the fight is over.”P
ogacar’s first full season at elite
level was 2019. He was 20 and
soon won the Tour of the
Algarve. In April he rode the
Tour of the Basque Country, a
tough six-day race in northern Spain.
It should have been too much for him
but by then he knew something he
daren’t mention. Every time he
moved to a higher level, boys to jun-
iors, juniors to under-23s, under-23s
to the World Tour, he never noticed
the difference. At every level he kept
winning. By 2019 he was working with
Íñigo San Millán, an associate pro-
fessor at the University of Colo-
rado and head of medical at
Team UAE. Millán, at that
Basque race, was left aston-
ished by the ease with which
Pogacar coped.
“On the morning of the final
stage I called his room and asked
if he could come down to the
lobby for a coffee,” San Millán
says. “He came and I said to him,
‘Tadej, you are going to become
the superstar but I want to say to
you, you must remain the person
you are.’ Many times since I’ve
reminded him of that conversation.
So far, he hasn’t changed.”
Pogacar grew up in Komenda, avillage 20km north of the Slovenia
capital, Ljubljana. Mirko, his father,
worked in a chair factory, Marjeta was
an English language teacher. “I
remember that my shit grades at
school bothered me more than my
parents. They liked us to go to bed at a
reasonable time and to be well
behaved. I liked my childhood and
always felt my parents reared us well.”
He tells of a family holiday to
France in 2010, packing up the Hyun-
dai and heading east. They stayed
with family friends in Paris, and at
modest hotels in the Alps. It was there
he first saw the Tour. As he reminisces
he also mentions years when there
were no holidays. They were far from
rich. If his childhood was a sandwich,
the meat didn’t fall over the sides.
And if you think he was the golden
child, he wants you to know about‘I grew up
knowing my
brother was
better than me.
Then one day
he just stopped’
C
an we know how he felt
early on that Saturday after-
noon in September as he
made his way to Lure, a
small town in eastern
France? Two days before his
22nd birthday, 57 seconds
away from the Yellow Jersey.
From Lure, there was a 36-kilometre
time-trial and then, the next day, the
relaxed procession on to the Champs-
Élysées. Tadej Pogacar was thinking
that he’d had a hell of a time at his first
Tour de France and wouldn’t be lying
when saying that he was pleased to
finish second.
This is the 2020 Tour, delayed by
Covid and then rushed to a thrilling
and unforeseen climax by two Slove-
nians. Pogacar was the younger one,
his compatriot Primoz Roglic nine
years older. For 11 consecutive days
Roglic had worn the Yellow Jersey.
Had the 2020 Tour been a marriage,
they would have been together for the
equivalent of 35 years. Pogacar’s last
chance at disruption had come in the
mountains three days earlier. He
tried. He lost. Or so it seemed.
Even television, the greatest
trumpeter of lost causes, had given up
on this. Excellent against the clock,
Roglic didn’t need a 57-second head
start on any rival but that’s what the
Team Jumbo-Visma rider had. In less
than an hour the Tour would be his.
But the kid, what was he thinking?
Fifteen months have passed. He sits
in the upstairs lobby of the Columbus
Hotel, in Monaco, where he now lives.
As with many of his peers, he resides
here for tax reasons and shares a mod-
est one-bedroom apartment with
Urska Zigart, his fiancée and fellow
professional bike rider.
That afternoon. That time-trial.
That cycling earthquake. All of it, he
remembers.
“In my head, the Tour was settled,”
Pogacar says. “He was going to win. I
was going to be second. The first part
of the time-trial was flat and I was
going pretty solid. Pretty good. They
were giving me time checks compared
to those already at the finish, not com-
pared with Primoz. I thought, ‘Just
keep going and maybe you can win
the stage.’ ”
The time-trial came in two parts:
30km on the flat, then a quick change
of bike and 6km of climbing to La
Planches des Belles Filles. Allow him
to recall the moment when he
switched to his road bike. “Something
funny happened,” he says. “It sud-
denly felt perfect. So light. We’re start-
ing the climb and I’m thinking, ‘This is
easier,’ adrenaline starts flowing and I
can keep going. It felt like some kind
of relief.”
He won his first Tour on that 5.9km
climb, to become the youngest win-
ner since 1904. On the mountain he
had no idea that he was riding for the
Yellow Jersey. Ear-pieces never sit
snugly for him, and on the right side
he doesn’t hear much anyway.
The team director’s voice was
drowned by the noise on the roadside.
He remembers hearing that he was
“four seconds up on Roglic”, and pre-
sumed they were talking about the
time-trial.
The Team UAE rider had no sense
that his rival was flagging badly. Min-DAVID
WA LS HChief Sports WriterOUT
Pogacar, the rider tipped to be
greatest since Merckx, says he’s
not even the best in his family
utes after crossing the line, when
everything became clear, it almost felt
wrong. “Before the time-trial, every-
one was super-happy about how the
race had gone. Even my friends. Pri-
moz would win, I’d be second. It was
perfect. And then it was not perfect.
And when it changes, it’s a weird feel-
ing. I completely understand that
some people back home were not
happy but that’s life.
“It was a strange feeling that I can-
not even explain. It was hard. I
couldn’t celebrate that Tour the way I
would have liked. All I can say is wePogacar wants to
obtain a camper van
to follow his fiancée,
Zigart, in the women’s
Tour in July. Below,
celebrating this year