Ever stronger: Tadej Pogacar won his first world championship title on Sunday in Zurich after an insane raid, which he himself described as “stupid”, attacking 100 kilometres from the finish to write a little more cycling history.
The Slovenian, who blew up the race with a completely crazy offensive, became only the third rider after Eddy Merckx, in 1974, and Stephen Roche, in 1987, to win the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the World Championships in the same year.
He won by maintaining a 34-second lead over Australian Ben O’Connor and 58 over Dutchman Mathieu van der Poel, who was the defending champion, after an insane raid, not recommended by all cycling manuals.
“I thought, ‘What are you doing? You’re shooting yourself in the foot.’ That wasn’t the plan, it was just stupid,” he said after his monumental 100km breakaway, one of the greatest feats in the history of his sport.
His rivals couldn’t believe it.
“Of course I was surprised. There were 100 km left. Normally it’s suicidal to start from so far back,” reacted Remco Evenepoel, who was in the running for a new time trial-road race double after that of the 2024 Olympics and who finished fifth.
“When he left, I thought, ‘He’s crazy,'” Van der Poel added.
“He followed his instinct. It’s just incredible,” Primoz Roglic said.
Pogacar, whose day had started with a broken alarm clock forcing his partner, Urska Zigart, to drag him out of bed, first came back like an arrow to a group of escapees where his compatriot Jan Tratnik was waiting for him.
“Luckily he was there. He’s a machine, he pulled some big relays,” said the Slovenian leader.
“Never seen anything like it: a steamroller”
He put another layer on twenty kilometers further, this time with the Frenchman Pavel Sivakov, his teammate for the year at UAE, as his companion.
Suffering martyrdom, Sivakov accompanied his leader for a lap, delighted with the opportunity to the point of waiting for his “mate”, before the Frenchman cracked on the steep Bergstrasse.
“I tried to follow him but I clearly got burned. His level is incredible. I have never seen anything like it, he was a steamroller,” Sivakov reported.
With 51 km to go, the Slovenian set off alone to complete his incredible odyssey.
Behind, Evenepoel and Van der Poel ended up reacting with a small group which included Romain Bardet for a long time, tenth and best Frenchman in the end, to get dangerously close.
But without managing to catch up with the Slovenian who, without ever taking more than a minute’s lead, resisted until the end, with courage.
“I really pulled myself together. It was very hard because the tank was empty. I was starting to get lost in my vision, I could barely hold on to the pedals but I gritted my teeth. I had to do it.”
“A dream”
Because the rainbow jersey, which he will wear until the next World Championships in September 2025 in Kigali, Rwanda, represented one of the big goals of his season.
“In recent years, I was chasing victories in the Tour, the Giro, the Tour of Flanders, without ever making the World Championships a real goal. But this year, I knew that, given the course, I had a great opportunity. It’s more than a dream come true.”
The UAE rider will be wearing his new jersey in a few days at the last classics in Italy, including the Tour of Lombardy on October 12, where he has won three races in a row.
The opportunity to further inflate his astonishing record of the season with 23 victories in 55 days of racing this year, a phenomenal ratio.
At just 26 years old, the list of achievements of the man who aspires to become the greatest of all time is growing by the day. He now has four Grand Tours, including three times the Tour de France with 17 stages in the process, six Monuments and a world title to his name for an already colossal total of 86 victories.
“He is exceptional, stronger than ever. And we have the impression that this is only the beginning,” Van der Poel said.
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