What is Tadej Pogačar doing at the Giro d’Italia

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The Giro d’Italia – the 107th edition will start on Saturday from Venaria Reale, in Piedmont, and finish on May 26 in Rome, in via dei Fori Imperiali – is often said to be “the hardest race in the most beautiful country”. A way, among other things, to avoid facing the fact that in recent years the race has lost international relevance, less and less able to compare in size, wealth and general sporting level with the Tour de France, the event on which the good performance and business of a large part of professional road cycling is based on the event in which the strongest riders in the world have chosen to participate for years, often giving up the Giro d’Italia. Yet this year among the 176 riders at the start of the Giro there will be one who according to many parameters can be considered the strongest of all: the 25-year-old Slovenian Tadej Pogačar.

Even before the Giro begins, the mere presence of Pogačar is already by far the main story of this edition, and his probable victory is the pivot around which much of the considerations regarding the event revolve, which in 21 stages will cover 3,321 kilometres, with a total difference in altitude of around 43 thousand metres. In recent years Pogačar has won almost everything he set out to win, and when he didn’t he still came very close.

Most importantly, Pogačar won the first two Tours de France he participated in, in 2020 and 2021, and finished second in 2022 and 2023, both times behind Dane Jonas Vingegaard. It was reasonable to expect that this year too Pogačar would have structured his season in view of the Tour, which takes place in July. For the first time in his career Pogačar has chosen to race the Giro instead, and then he also plans the Tour. He aims to win both races in the same year, as Marco Pantani last did in 1998, when Pogačar still had to be born and as many have tried to do since then, almost always ending up failing to win either the Giro or the Tour.

So why did Pogačar choose to race the Giro d’Italia this year? The reasons are many and only some have been explained by the person concerned or by those close to him. They concern the way in which the Giro was able to attract Pogačar, some peculiarities of this year’s route and certainly the extraordinary nature of Pogačar himself and his simple ambition to also race the Giro, in addition to the Tour. Some have to do with what cycling has become in recent years and others with the paradoxical fact that Pogačar is a rider sometimes described as almost unbeatable but who at the same time has “not won” his last two Tours de France.

A first set of reasons for this participation of Pogačar, announced already in December, concerns the cycling exceptionality it represents. He is in fact a rider capable of winning with remarkable consistency on very different routes, both in one-day races, which require explosiveness and power, and in stage races, in which one must be complete and resistant. In the latter so far he has only had one real rival, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, who, however, unlike him, almost always aims only at the big target, the Tour. Pogačar has won so much, often attacking from afar and arriving at the finish line from only, even with a couple of minutes on the second place, there are those who have asked themselves whether we should be grateful to be able to admire his victories or instead almost annoyed at how dominant he is, and how much his victories have sometimes seemed almost inevitable. In view of the Giro, Pogačar was defined by specialized sites as Cycling News the «stratospheric favorite» for the pink jersey (for almost a century the symbol of the lead in the Giro); Veil instead he wrote, for example, that “only an act of God or a lot of bad luck could prevent him from winning the race.” After trying to keep up with his wheel (i.e. keep up with him) during the decisive moments of the recent Liège-Bastogne-Liège without succeeding and then arriving at the finish line with a considerable delay, the Dane Mattias Skjelmose said: «If you get closer You get burned in the sun too much.”

However, Pogačar’s objective exceptionality is only a precondition for his participation in the Giro; there are also more practical reasons. First of all, the progress in training and planning with which peaks in form and intensity are programmed, as well as in the way in which athletes fuel themselves during races and recover between one and the next. All this makes it at least plausible to try to win the Giro d’Italia, rest a month and then show up at the Tour de France to cover thousands of kilometers in another 21 stages. In this case, the example of the American Sepp Kuss is given, who in 2023 raced (as a gregarious, in aid and support of his captains) the Giro and the Tour, and then went on to win the Vuelta di Spagna in September (other 21 stages for another three weeks of racing).

Pogačar rides for a team, Team UAE Emirates, which also as a result of its many victories in recent years has strengthened a lot, thus building a large group of high-level riders who will be able to share in supporting him both at the Giro and at the Tour. Riders who in some cases they have demonstrated, in the absence of Pogačar, that they themselves can aim for the very top positions in the final ranking of three-week races such as the Giro, Tour and Vuelta.

We must then consider how this year’s Giro d’Italia is made: the route changes with each edition and this time it has elements that could make the Giro-Tour combination less difficult. In fact, there will be more time trial kilometers than in most editions of recent years, shorter stages on average, fewer climbs and a slightly less tough final week than in the past. This means that Pogačar will have a lot of ground to exploit his superiority in the time trial (where often even just a few kilometers are enough to gain many seconds) and a route that could offer him the opportunity to gain an advantage from the first days, and then try to manage the advantage accumulated through stages that are almost never too long and which, although in the last week there will still be the usual Alpine stages, will end less in crescendo than in the past. Ideal, in short, for anyone who wants to finish the Giro while already thinking about the Tour de France.

There are no certain elements to support that RCS Sport, which organizes the Giro d’Italia, designed the route in this way to entice Pogačar to come and compete in Italy. Many variables come into play when choosing a route thousands of kilometers long, and it is likely that, without Pogačar, a route like this could have created a very exciting and balanced race. However, it is certain that Pogačar’s presence is very convenient for the Giro in terms of image, relevance and advertising revenue. In fact, if it is said that almost a century ago the organizers of the Giro paid Alfredo Binda not to participate because he was too strong and favored, now it is in the interest of the Giro that an athlete like Pogačar participates, and even that he wins by a landslide.

There are not even certain elements to say that RCS Sport paid Pogačar or his team to encourage him to participate in the Giro, but some sector newspapers have pointed out certain links between RCS and the United Arab Emirates (and therefore with Team UAE Emirates ). However, it is common practice for an event like the Giro d’Italia to try in various ways to make itself as attractive as possible, through many ways, to the strongest and most representative athletes.

Staying with the more sporting aspects, and more directly close to Pogačar himself, we must then take into account his age and, again, his potential. At 25, the age at which until a few years ago a cyclist began to establish himself, Pogačar has already won 70 races, several of them several times: he has already won three of the five so-called monument classics, the one-day races with the most history and importance, and he is among the few in history who can at least think of winning all five. The Trofeo Senza Fine (the trophy given to those who win the Giro) would already be a notable addition to his CV; the Giro-Tour combination would be even more so. And by trying now, as a young athlete with few ailments, Pogačar can carry on with his work or at least leave himself space for other future attempts if he doesn’t succeed this year. In the past, however, it often happened that the strongest riders aimed to win as many Tours as possible and only later, at the end of their careers, did they also try to aim for the Giro and therefore the Giro-Tour combination.

Pogačar during the “Strade Bianche” last March, which takes place in Tuscany (Fabio Ferrari/Lapresse)

More than in many other sports, in cycling the past is often a yardstick for contemporary athletes, a parameter through which to evaluate their greatness in absolute terms. For Pogačar this seems to apply even more than for others: after one of his recent victories Alexandre Roos wrote onTeam that Pogačar “does not seem to be in competition with his rivals but engaged in a challenge with history”. Pogačar himself said that he has reached “a point where the goal is to try to be the best ever”, and doing so means trying to win everything, including the Giro, and if possible also the Giro and the Tour at the same time year, as in history only seven riders have done, two of which were Fausto Coppi and Eddy Merckx.

Another, in this case declared, reason why Pogačar will run the Giro is the desire to change: partly to try something new compared to the past and partly, even more banally, to change his training and preparation routine. «Tadej wanted a new challenge, he didn’t want to repeat the same program, have the same mental approach, do the same old races; and we have seen that when he finds new stimuli he gives the best of himself”, Joxean Fernàndez Matxin, general manager of the UAE-Emirates Team, said of him.

The new challenge is therefore not the Giro itself, but the Giro in view of the Tour, where Vingegaard and two other strong riders such as Primož Roglič and Remco Evenepoel will arrive not in the best shape due to the consequences of the accident they suffered at the start April at the Tour of the Basque Country.

But Pogačar didn’t know this when, alone among the strongest riders in the world, he had already decided to race both the Giro and the Tour. In any case, although his Giro is already described as only the first half (and the easier half) of something bigger, winning it won’t be easy anyway, with everything that can happen to us in three weeks and over three thousand kilometers of roads. Interviewed in 2022 by the Slovenian site Siol Pogačar responded to a question about the feasibility of the Giro-Tour pairing like this: «It’s possible, but winning both requires a lot from the body. You can both win, but then you can feel the consequences. It’s something that could end a career, it’s a challenge, but it’s very difficult.”