TADEJ POGAČAR HAS the only menacing cowlick in sports.
Pogačar himself is hardly a menacing man. Like most professional cyclists, the 27-year-old Slovenian is slightly built -- 5-foot-9 and about 145 pounds -- and his clean-shaven face and easy smile make him look especially boyish. His first great triumphs occurred when he was not much more than a child: a Tour de France victory at age 21, then a second Tour win and an Olympic bronze medal at 22.
But like a lot of kids, he just can't get his hair to behave. Pogačar crops his straight, light brown hair close on the sides but leaves it longer on top, where it's perpetually in a state of disorder. It's messy in his official team photos. It peeks out under the band of his casquette when he stands on the winner's podium. And it sticks up through the vents of his helmet as he races.
Every other aero-obsessed rider keeps his coiffure under control, so Pogačar's hair makes him easy to spot when his race number is hidden. Rivals who look back and see that cowlick know what's coming.
Tom Pidcock, a two-time Olympic mountain bike champion, is one of the best bike handlers in the world. In March 2025, he was following Pogačar through the dusty mountain paths of Tuscany in Strade Bianche, a prestigious one-day race famous for its beautiful scenery. With 50 kilometers to go, Pogačar took a corner too quickly and slid off the road, bouncing ass-over-tea kettle into a grassy culvert.
Pidcock navigated the turn easily and meandered off down the country lane in pursuit of solo victory. Pogačar remounted, elbow bloodied and skinsuit in tatters, and caught Pidcock within 5 kilometers. When he saw the cowlick in his rearview mirror, Pidcock eased up in a gesture of sportsmanship to let Pogačar reestablish his position from before the crash.
Pogačar repaid that kindness with a brutal attack, leaving Pidcock in his dust -- literally, given the white gravel roads for which Strade Bianche is named.
Over the past seven years, dozens of the world's greatest cyclists have suffered the same fate as Pidcock. On high Alpine passes, in the rocky farmlands of Flanders, and in hill country from Quebec to Kigali, Pogačar has dominated all comers on all terrain.
In a sport where victory is rare and hard-earned, even for all-time greats, Pogačar is unique. He only shows up for the biggest races, and whenever he straps on his helmet -- tufts of sandy hair poking out where they will -- he expects to win. In a sport that trended for decades toward specialization, Pogačar is the first rider in half a century to roll up to the world's toughest races and try to win them all.
There is no bigger race in cycling than the Tour de France, and Pogačar is as dominant there as anywhere. He's started the race six times and has four general classification wins, two second-place finishes, and 21 stage wins to show for it. When he hits this year's start ramp on July 4, he'll be the overwhelming favorite to claim a fifth victory, which would tie the official all-time record. And given what he has accomplished away from the Tour, he won't be opening a debate over who the greatest cyclist of all time is. He'll be closing it.
Unfortunately, cycling is not a sport that takes much on faith. Performance-enhancing drugs have been part and parcel of the sport since the first Tours de France 120 years ago; Lance Armstrong's doping admission all but killed mainstream interest in the sport in the U.S., but he's just one culprit in a lengthy chronology. Even Eddy Merckx, cycling's Ruthian demigod whose first of five titles came in 1969, tested positive for stimulants three times in his career, albeit in a less proscriptive environment that mostly left his reputation intact.
In the wake of Pogačar's 2024 Tour de France title, amid his most dominant season to date, he professed that he was clean, saying it was "stupid" to risk his health with PEDs. But he acknowledged the validity of the question nonetheless: "There will always be doubts ... Because of cycling before my time, in any sport, if someone is winning, there's always jealousy and haters."
Pogačar isn't just facing down his rivals, or history. He's trying to get his sport to believe in miracles again.
POGAČAR COMES FROM a town called Klanec, nestled in the mountains just north of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The country, with its 2.1 million residents, punches above its weight across sports, but cycling is one of its best. So, when Pogačar joined the top tier of pro cycling in 2019, the path to the top went through another Slovenian star: Primož Roglič.
Roglič was the heavy favorite to win the 2020 Tour de France, and heading into the final competitive stage -- an uphill individual time trial on the Planche des Belles Filles -- he had the yellow jersey and led Pogačar by 57 seconds.
No one expected the order to change. Roglič was a world championship silver medalist in the time trial, and while Pogačar had gamely kept the race close, the 30-year-old Roglič had remained in control the whole way. Roglič rode well that day, finishing fifth on the stage, but Pogačar blew him out of the water. The cycling world watched in astonishment as the time gap steadily scrolled down, flipped over to Pogačar's favor, and kept ticking over to a final margin of almost two minutes.
At the Planche des Belles Filles, the finish line is just over the crest of the final hill, so the TV broadcast showed Pogačar emerging over the horizon as the youngest Tour de France champion in 116 years.
Pogačar's time trial triumph was instantly recognized as one of the sport's great historic upsets, and launched him to superstardom. A year later, he defended his title with ease, signaling that the world's best rider was only getting better.
The Tour de France is the biggest bike race in the world, but it makes up only a small portion of the professional cycling calendar, which features dozens of races across multiple continents, each with its own unique terrain and format.
With two Tour de France titles under his belt at age 22, Pogačar was already a historically precocious stage racer, and most riders in his position would've gone after the other two three-week Grand Tours: the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España, in addition to defending their Tour de France titles. Pogačar, in a somewhat controversial turn, chose another path. Some of the sport's biggest stars made their names at grueling one-day races that bookend the year's racing calendar. The five most prestigious of these are known as the Monuments: Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Il Lombardia and, most famously, Paris-Roubaix.
Each of these races has its own demands, only some of which overlap with the skills required to win the Tour de France. Only three men ever have won all five over the course of their career, and only one has the full set of both grand tours and Monuments: Merckx.
On top of his stage racing calendar, Pogačar has systematically been winning one Monument after another. His CV (or palmarès, to use the cycling term) now includes five overall titles across two of the three grand tours and 13 titles across four of the five Monuments. It's a diversity of accomplishments not seen since Merckx, done much more quickly.
But, on some level, a bike race is a bike race, right? Can winning the Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix really be that different?
Yes, says cycling coach Neal Henderson, founder of Apex Performance in Colorado.
"That would be like going to the Olympics in track and field and saying, 'I'm going to win the 100 meters, I'm going to win the decathlon, I'm going to win the marathon, and the steeplechase in one Olympics.' No one person can do all that. But [Pogačar] is the one person who might be able to do all that."
ON A FLAT, well-paved road, a group of professional cyclists can ride along at more than 30 miles per hour all the live long day. At those speeds, wind resistance is the main obstacle in the race, so riders clump up in a group and take turns cutting through the wind while everyone else drafts behind them.
Under those conditions, the rider who can put down the most power in the last few seconds of the race will cross the finish line first. Plenty of professional races cover flat ground, and they're dominated by riders -- sprinters, in the sport's parlance -- who can crank out thousands of watts over the decisive final seconds.
But this kind of racing can get monotonous, so race organizers try to break up the peloton by putting stuff in the way: Steep hills, big mountains, or uneven road surfaces.
Each type of obstacle has given rise to a class of rider who specializes in defeating it: puncheurs, climbers, and classics specialists, respectively. Other riders excel at the individual time trial, where they race alone against the clock. Cycling enthusiasts call time trials "the race of truth" because there's nowhere to hide.
Physiologically, each subdiscipline is about the length and intensity of effort a rider can produce. Riders who aim to win a grand tour, like Pogačar, target climbs and time trials, because those stages are where they can gain the most time on the field.
"Those long climbs and time trials are 20 to 60 minutes of the highest effort that the rider can hold," says Henderson. "The specialists in those two disciplines-the climbers and the time trialists-are usually not the same people, but a general classification rider has to be equally good at both of those and be near the specialists."
The Tour de France is won and lost by those long aerobic efforts, and anyone who wants the maillot jaune into Paris is usually happy to let the other subdisciplines slide. For example: The only rider who's ever beaten Pogačar at the Tour is the Danish climber Jonas Vingegaard, who tips the scales at 127 pounds and hasn't finished a one-day race on any terrain in almost four years. Stage racing is the whole ballgame for him.
Not so Pogačar. He can not only climb with Vingegaard, he can-and does-navigate the slick, muddy cobbles of the classics. And he can hold his own against the explosive, muscular riders, like three-time Paris-Roubaix winner Mathieu van der Poel, who live for those races. Five years ago, no rider was capable of living in this middle ground.
Cycling coach Tim Cusick has worked with Pogačar's performance coach, Javier Sola, and has seen some of the numbers Pogačar has been able to produce. From his standpoint, Pogačar's dominance starts with one innate advantage.
"He's what I would call physiologically elastic," Cusick says. "If we think about how we perform as human beings, the way our energy systems, or musculoskeletal systems, the way we're meant to perform walking or running away from dinosaurs or whatever, we've evolved where [most elite athletes] tend to be really good at one or two genetic pieces."
In cycling, the difference in specializations isn't as physically obvious as it is in other sports, but it's significant nonetheless. Pogačar being good-to-great at every aspect of the sport is as much of an aberration as a football player who could play quarterback and on the defensive line.
That not only means Pogačar is competitive at races as disparate as the Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix, it gives him advantages within races. He can sprint to force separation from other climbers, then use his time trial ability to make the advantage stick. He can hit anyone where they're weak and get away with it, because he doesn't really have any weaknesses himself. Pogacar dominates in a way unseen in modern cycling.
He does things that seem almost supernatural.
POGAČAR WAS BORN in 1998, an infamous year for the Tour de France. Three days before the start of the race, a staffer for the Festina team was caught smuggling performance-enhancing drugs across the border from Belgium into France. French police started raiding team cars and hotel rooms, and several riders, coaches and staffers were arrested.
Seven of the 21 participating teams withdrew midrace either in protest or because their riders had been arrested. Stage 17 had to be canceled when the entire peloton went on strike, and only 96 of the 189 starters finished the race. The race itself turned into a thrilling duel between defending champion Jan Ullrich and charismatic Italian climber Marco Pantani. But while Ullrich and Pantani got out of the Festina Affair without incident, both were busted for doping later.
The damage to the race, and the sport, was immense. Sponsors weren't happy to learn that they'd been paying millions of dollars to associate themselves with cheaters and drug smugglers, and they pulled out en masse. Fans started to turn up their noses at a sport that culled almost half the entrants from its marquee event because of drugs. Elite bike racing was genuinely in existential danger. Until, just one year later, an inspirational underdog returned from life-threatening illness to win the Tour and usher in a new era of cycling.
But riding out of Festina on Lance Armstrong's coattails was like smothering a fire with gunpowder.
Only seven years passed between the Festina Affair and Armstrong's first retirement in 2005, but the larger doping era of cycling lasted almost 20 years. Greg LeMond, the three-time Tour de France winner and consensus greatest American cyclist ever, became a fervent anti-doping advocate after he retired in 1994, and he was an early skeptic of Armstrong's. LeMond said he noticed a massive uptick in riders' stamina and recovery ability in the early 1990s. This was the result of a drug called erythropoietin, or EPO. EPO increases red blood cell production and is usually used to treat anemia. Endurance athletes took to it because more red blood cells equals more oxygen in the blood, which means better stamina.
In the early days, things got a little out of hand. Sprinters looked like bodybuilders, and even grand tour contenders were racing at weights 20 or 30 pounds heavier than today's GC riders.
Riders were taking enough EPO to turn their blood to slurry. That's not an exaggeration. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, dozens of healthy young cyclists died suspiciously in their sleep of heart attacks. There are oft-repeated stories of riders sleeping with heart monitors on; if their heart rate dropped too low, they'd wake up and do cardio until it was safe to go back to sleep. EPO was banned in the early 1990s, but there wasn't a reliable test for it until 2000. In the meantime, cycling's governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) tested red blood cell concentration, and riders would dope enough to get just up to that legal limit. Once the EPO test came in, riders found other ways of producing more red blood cells.
Tyler Hamilton, one of the best grand tour riders of Armstrong's generation, described his doping regimen in great detail in his autobiography, The Secret Race. He'd have a pint of blood drawn a week before the Tour de France, and have it reinfused on a rest day to thicken his blood. When he found he needed a boost for the third week of the race, he and his team figured out a transfusion schedule that would allow him to add or remove blood over the course of a race, like topping up fluids in a car.
As the doping restrictions got tighter, the riders only got more creative. Hamilton won a gold medal in the time trial at the 2004 Olympics, but a month later, a drug test at the Vuelta found someone else's blood in his system. Hamilton surrendered his gold medal in 2011. In 2007, the presumptive Tour de France winner, Michael Rasmussen, got fired mid-race as suspicions rose about his eluding doping control officers. Well into the 2010s, the UCI was rewriting the scoresheet as riders were caught doping and suspended. While many of those riders came back and raced clean later on, that generation is just now filtering out of the sport. The rider who finished between Roglič and Pogačar on that 2019 Vuelta a España podium was Alejandro Valverde. Valverde had been caught in the same Spanish anti-doping campaign, Operación Puerto, that had ensnared Hamilton all those years earlier.
Armstrong's doping was hardly remarkable. The difference between what his U.S. Postal Service team was doing and what the rest of the peloton was doing was in degree, rather than kind. In 2005, every top-10 finisher at the Tour de France at least had some credible reported connection to doping; eight of those 10, including Armstrong, had race results voided after a positive test or admission.
The most salacious and off-putting elements of Amstrong's story came off the bike. His heroic return from deathly illness was one of the most widely celebrated stories in American culture, and his saintlike stature allowed him to launder a multitude of interpersonal sins: Bullying riders who gave testimony to anti-doping investigators. Slandering a team staffer who spoke to a journalist investigating Armstrong. Colluding with the UCI to mask a positive drug test in 1999. It was these transgressions, rather than the doping itself, that finally caused cycling's famous omerta to crack. Not the original act, but the hubristic rot that grew out of it. Sophocles would've followed the Armstrong story just fine.
Armstrong's fall from grace was the end of the story in the U.S., but the decay continued into the 2010s. The last four-time Tour de France winner, Chris Froome, was nearly suspended in 2018 when a higher-than-permitted concentration of asthma medication turned up in his blood. (Froome was ultimately acquitted and cleared to race without sanction.)
In any other sport, a revolutionary athlete like Pogačar would be the object of wonder. But cycling is just now winning back the trust of fans who have already seen the impossible, only to learn later that it was all a sham. Irish rider Ben Healy, whose team, EF Education-EasyPost, was founded in the late 2000s with an explicitly anti-doping mission, is among those leading the fight for credibility. "I think because of what happened with U.S. Postal and Lance, it actually moved our sport forward with all the testing we do," he says. "At the Tour de France, [Pogačar] gets tested every single day he's in the yellow jersey, and he's spent a lot of days in the yellow jersey, you know? I think you can be really confident that the majority of guys are clean."
Pogačar's team declined to make him available for this story. But when I put a similar question to the American coaches - how can we know the sport is any cleaner now? - they all paused for a moment under the weight of the question.
"The culture is very much: Don't take drugs," says Adam Mills, a former professional directeur sportif and current coach at Source Endurance in California. "That said, there's always been that battle in professional sports between performance-enhancing drugs and rule enforcement, and it waxes and wanes all the time."
Here's the inescapable fact: The racing is now faster than it was in Armstrong's day. Last year's Tour de France, visited one of the race's most famous climbs, Mont Ventoux, site of a legendary duel between Armstrong and Pantani in 2000, when both were as doped up as ever. Pogačar and Vingegaard both broke the record time for the climb by more than a minute, and 15 other riders put in times that were good enough for the top 50 all-time.
How is that possible if the sport is clean?
The days of blood transfusions and synthetic testosterone are over, but teams are just as desperate for an edge than ever. Froome's team-then Team Sky, now known as Netcompany Ineos after a sponsor change-was famous for the philosophy of its manager, Sir Dave Brailsford. Brailsford's pursuit of so-called "marginal gains" became famous enough to permeate sports and seep over into business, a sort of European version of "Trust the Process."
Those marginal gains included playing fast and loose with therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) for controlled substances, which is how Froome got into trouble. Last year, Brailsford and Ineos came under further scrutiny for their alleged involvement with a German doctor linked to doping.
Every team uses altitude training to increase its riders' red blood cell counts, which is what they were after with blood bags and EPO in the 1990s. Some teams, including Pogačar's UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Vingegaard's Visma-Lease a Bike outfit, used carbon monoxide rebreathers, which were rumored to stimulate red blood cell production, before the UCI banned the practice in 2025.
In February of this year, Chris Marshall-Bell reported in The Athletic that the UCI was hoping for a big-name doping suspension to validate public confidence in its testing program, as the lack of recent scandal has, paradoxically, started to make some in the sport nervous.
Pogačar said it himself: There will always be doubts. But here's the other thing: The gains he and his rivals have made in the past few years can at least plausibly be explained by advances in technology, training and nutrition.
"If you just look at the average speed, most people will point to that and say, 'Well, I don't know if I can believe it,'" Henderson says. "But there's been significant development on the aerodynamic side, not just of the bikes and wheels, but the skinsuits, the helmets, the rolling resistance on the tires. So there is a pure physics explanation for some of the speed. The power that has been sustained over the last five years is just minimally different."
That's in line with general evolutionary advancement in human physical fitness-after all, we just saw the first two-hour marathon in competition back in April, Henderson says. What Pogačar is doing is exceptional, but by no means impossible.
"When I do the math, it's possible for an individual, for an extraordinarily well-trained person, to be able to do this," Henderson says. "Anyone who wins any of those events is one in eight billion. They're extraordinary to begin with. But what I'm seeing, in terms of power output and speed, is in a believable realm. Absolutely at the upper limit of what we know is humanly possible, but it is [possible]."
APPARENTLY, WHAT POGAČAR is doing now couldn't have been done in the 2000s.
Not only have training and nutrition advanced beyond what PEDs were able to provide in the 1990s and 2000s, the argument goes, the EPO and blood doping era made cycling coaches too lazy to pursue those gains in the first place.
"Athletes in that phase were basically trained like they were in the 1940s and 1950s," Cusick says. "It hadn't evolved. It got stuck, and suddenly, because people found an answer in a syringe and a pill and a cream and whatever, it actually got more stuck. So you come out of that phase, and thank goodness, there was a hole. There was this big piece missing: How do we get faster?"
The first innovation after the peak doping era was emphasis on power-to-weight ratio. In the 2010s, riders would lose as much weight as possible, and avoid strength training. Coaches believed any extra muscle would be dead weight after five hours in the saddle.
Froome, the dominant stage racer of his generation, clocked in at 6-foot-1, 145 pounds in his peak years-some 20 pounds under his racing weight when he turned pro. Froome's famous bowed-elbows riding style showed off pencil-thin forearms. But that weight loss allowed a rider with the steady power to finish on the Olympic time trial podium to climb with his more compact riders, and made him nearly unbeatable in the grand tours.
Eventually, Cusick says, performance coaches realized that diets that were efficient for weight loss also sapped riders of their power. And those who came along the generation after Froome, like Pogačar, gained enough power through added muscle to offset the added bulk. "They started younger, with better nutritional knowledge and better guidance. Gone was the weight stigma," says Cusick. "Pogi eats a lot. He strength trains. His nutrition is staggering. He has a chef, two nutritionists, two strength trainers. He's a product of the move from training cyclists to whole athletes."
The transition to data-driven training was not easy, Cusick says. As recently as 20 years ago, professional team managers and coaches viewed power meters-portable computers that show riders how many watts they're putting down in real time-as toys for dilettantes and sometimes outright banned their riders from using them. The traditionalist and anti-empirical movement was as strong in cycling as it was in baseball or soccer. But riders who came of age in the late 2010s and early 2020s, including and especially Pogačar, are more open-minded on tech and data.
Pogačar will gain or lose a couple of pounds throughout the year, depending on what kind of race he's targeting, but he usually comes in at between 145 and 150 pounds-roughly the same as Froome-even though he's only 5-foot-9.
That places him in a bit of a Goldilocks zone. This is another piece of the puzzle. Pogačar's signature move in one-day races is to pick a hill early in the race, attack, drop his rivals, and ride steadily off into the sunset while his pursuers struggle and fail to organize a chase.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
The Super Bowl for puncheurs is Ardennes Week, a series of prestigious three one-day races in the hills of Belgium and the Netherlands: Amstel Gold Race, La Flèche Wallonne, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the oldest monument. Since 2021, Pogačar has started these three races a total of 10 times, with seven wins and one second-place finish.
The most famous single climb in Ardennes Week is the Mur de Huy, a climb of less than a mile, but with a massive uphill kick in the back half ("mur" is French for "wall") that ramps up to a maximum gradient of 26 percent.
This is where Healy attacked Pogačar in 2025. Healy is one of the best puncheurs in the world. The 25-year-old is a two-time Irish national road race champion, a world road race bronze medalist, and a stage winner at both the Tour and Giro. When Pogačar claimed the race lead for good in Stage 12 of last year's Tour, it was Healy he took the yellow jersey from.
Healy attacked hard as the road got steepest, springing out the pack with an almighty effort to jump out into the lead.
As Healy rocked out of the saddle at maximum effort, Pogačar came over his shoulder, seated and breathing easily, glasses hanging casually out of the collar of his jersey. Even his hair was under control, for a change, thanks to a helmet with low-profile vents for the cold, rainy conditions. Within a few pedal strokes, he'd distanced Healy and the rest of the field.
"It's awful, honestly," Healy says. "You look down [at the power meter] and you're at 600 watts-plus. That's a pretty high number, and he just comes past me in the saddle. It looks like he's nose breathing."
BEING A GENERATIONAL talent who happens to have been born in the right place and time and grown to the right size, isn't enough to explain Pogačar's success. Riders working together will usually be faster than riders working alone. Cycling is a team sport.
Cycling is unlike most team sports in that admission for fans is (almost always) free. Because teams can't sell tickets (or peanuts and Cracker Jack), they make their money through sponsorship, including title sponsorship. The big sponsors get their logos festooned across their athletes' chests, just like in soccer and auto racing. But unlike in those sports, the title sponsor gets to name the team.
Pogačar's team is UAE Team Emirates-XRG. As you might infer, the team's funding and sponsorship comes mostly from the Emirati government. And those of you who know what the big money from Abu Dhabi has done for Manchester City can guess that Pogačar's team is funded quite generously.
Not only has that made Pogačar the highest-paid man on two wheels, it's bought the services of a deep supporting cast. Pogačar's top lieutenant, Englishman Adam Yates, is a serial top-10 finisher at the Tour de France. Australian Jay Vine and American Brandon McNulty combine top-end climbing ability with elite time trial power, making them powerful allies on stages that have more than one mountain ascent.
And in addition to these veterans, UAE is bringing through some of the sport's brightest young stars, including 22-year-old Mexican all-rounder Isaac del Toro. Del Toro delighted the cycling world by coming within a stage of winning last year's Giro d'Italia. He's won multiple top-level classics and one-week stage races, and might be the closest thing the cycling world has to a next Pogačar.
These assistants, or domestiques, control the tempo of the race for Pogačar and pace him up big climbs. In La Fléche Wallonne last year, when Healy came from back in the pack to go over the top, Pogačar was near the front of the peloton but not at it. He had a teammate, Jan Christen, in front to cut through the wind. I asked Healy how much having a draft really mattered when the road got that steep. A lot, it turns out.
"One thing you don't really appreciate on TV is how fast we're still going on climbs," Healy says. "It's still 20-plus miles per hour. If you stick your hand out the window of a car at 20 miles an hour, you'll definitely feel the tension on it...And even on the steep climbs when we're going a bit slower, there's that psychological effect of, 'I've got a teammate. I've got support. They're doing this for me. It's kind of hyping you up and giving you the confidence to do it as well. You can't take that factor for granted."
Pogačar's team usually makes its presence known in Ardennes-style races. This is where Pogačar's long-range attacks are most devastating. Some combination of teammates sets a hellacious pace, dropping all but the strongest few riders, and stretching even those to the limit. Then, Pogačar picks a good-looking hill and attacks, often with more than an hour of open road between him and the finish.
Sometimes, a strong rider, like Healy, Pidcock, or van der Poel, will hang for a few minutes. But this is where Pogačar's elasticity kicks in. Anyone who can match Pogačar's 15-second power might not be able to match his four-minute power, and anyone who can match both of those surely won't be able to hang on riding at the aerobic threshold all afternoon.
"Power is access to options," says Cusick. "He's the most powerful rider in the peloton right now not because his watts are higher, but at any given race he has more tactical options available than any other rider he competes with."
SO POGAČAR HAS unique physical gifts and the perfect body type to maximize them. He came along at the perfect time to capitalize on a quantum leap forward in training and nutrition, and he has the perfect team around him. From that standpoint, the appropriate comparison is obvious. "You're talking about the right person at the right time, in the right scenario, to be a superstar," says Cusick. "You have a Michael Jordan here, a Tiger Woods."
Or, as Mills puts it: "Tadej is a generational talent at worst."
At best, the greatest rider of all time. Maybe one of the greatest athletes in any sport. Pogačar already has two world road race championships, and he's won two of the three grand tours and four of the five monuments. Only the Vuelta and Paris-Roubaix stand between Pogačar and Merckx.
Pogačar hasn't raced the Vuelta since 2019, but his record at the Tour and Giro since then (seven starts, five wins, two second-place finishes) suggests he'd do just as well there. Paris-Roubaix, with its brutal flat cobbled roads, is the greatest challenge-it's been 45 years since a male Tour de France winner won on Paris-Roubaix-but Pogačar has raced it twice and finished second twice. Surely, he'll break the door down eventually.
Merckx also holds the record for most grand tour wins (11) and most monument wins (19). Pogačar has five grand tour wins and 13 monument wins, which is already good for second all-time in the latter category. But the numbers don't tell the whole story. Just as Babe Ruth dominated an immature sport here, Merckx rode in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, cycling was not only primitive in its training and tactics, but in practice only contested by riders from western Europe.
Pogačar is conquering the cycling calendar faster than Merckx did, at a more consistent rate, and against immeasurably harder competition. Competition so stiff that achievements we take for granted now would've been unthinkable as recently as 18 months ago.
Back then, the prospect of any Tour de France champion winning Paris-Roubaix would've been a joke. That it's a matter of when it will happen, not if, shows how far Pogačar has pushed himself. Occasionally, one of Pogačar's rivals will catch lightning in a bottle and beat him. But on the whole, he's in a class of his own.
"He's just better," Healy says. "He never makes a mistake. He never misses a split. He rarely crashes. He's always in the front with his team. He's just absolutely dominant...whatever his weakness is, it's still almost always better than the people who are best at it."
Within the peloton, the question of whether Pogačar is for real has already been answered. Whenever he pins on a race number, everyone in the cycling world knows he can win. And when he attacks, even if the move comes hours before the finish, his rivals also know he can't be brought back. You can see it in their tactics and body language; when Pogačar is out in front, everyone else starts racing for second place. In fact, it takes an act of God for Pogačar to come up short in a big race these days.
Whether the rest of the sporting world believes is a different question.
Maybe the wounds within cycling are too deep for some people to trust in superhuman performances. Belief isn't a rational proposition anyway; faith, they say, is the evidence of things unseen. But with every win, with every paradigm-shifting effort, Pogačar will turn more and more of the doubters into believers, each conversion its own kind of miracle.
