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Everything appears to be going Tadej Pogačar's way, except one thing, that he’s attempting one of the most arduous endurance feats in modern sport.
Marco Pantani, a year prior to being chucked out of the Giro d’Italia for suspicious hematocrit levels, was the last man to win the Giro-Tour back in 1998, before Pogačar was even born. Both were entertainers of the highest level, peerless climbers, but few would argue that Pantani had the same all-round capabilities as the sensational Slovenian. He was the last to achieve ‘the double’, and that was a different era of the sport… Lance Armstrong would finish atop the podium for the next seven editions of the Tour.
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Others have gone close, most recently Chris Froome (1st and 3rd) and Tom Dumoulin (2nd and 2nd) both podiumed in the 2018 Giro and Tour. But the task is not one willingly taken on, and is regarded too hard for most, and you can see the way it is viewed by the adaptations to Pogačar's schedule of racing and training.
UAE Team Emirates have taken a meticulous approach to the season restricting Pogačar to just 10 days racing ahead of the Giro d’Italia. He was clearly doing a ton of training around those race days though as he was flying during that period, taking six stage or one-day wins, and the Volta Catalunya overall.
The Giro went great, there were no crashes to complain of for the Slovenian, he wasn’t pushed hard in a slog to take the overall win, but still showed that he was in great shape, winning six stages and the overall by just shy of ten minutes.
He won’t race until the start of the Tour de France, though now the pre-target altitude training camps are becoming more important to preparation than even the traditional Tour lead-in races and are perhaps a more important indicator. No doubt Pogačar will have the UAE performance scientists poring over the data and checking that he’s on track.
The big hurdle for the 25-year-old is not his ability, not his experience and not his team support, but rather how he can recover and what his opposition will put in his way over the course of three weeks of high pressure racing.
The biggest worrying point for Pogačar is that he’s never been able or willing to try to race two Grand Tours in the same season. Last year, he was down for the Vuelta after his spectacular explosion on the Col de la Loze saw him a distant second to Vingegaard at the Tour, but his medical team ruled it out after he didn’t hit the required physiological checks.
Would they pull him out of the Tour for the same reasons? It seems unlikely, the Tour is the reason Pogačar gets paid the big bucks, he started last year underdone with injury, and this year, the same will be likely even if he’s not recovered fully from the Giro.
Even if he’s returning to apparent top form, this second Grand Tour is still virgin territory for a rider that has had his aura of invincibility only shattered a few times, most memorably at the hands of Vingegaard at the two most recent Tours de France.
"I'm still far from doing the double, I know that others have tried and failed," Pogačar said of the Giro-Tour double.
"You have to start the Giro in good shape, win the Giro, then start the Tour in good shape and finally win the Tour. It's going to be a hell of a job. We'll take it step by step and hope we can pull it off."
Pogačar is helped by his team, the strongest he’s ever had at his disposal, and with perhaps three other potential winners if they do go with the line-up of Adam Yates, Juan Ayuso and Joao Almeida. They might be so strong that we could see a Sepp Kuss or Geraint Thomas (notably when Chris Froome was trying the Giro-Tour double) winning situation where they are able to leverage their traditional leader’s known strength to get up the road under the radar of other teams.
He's helped by the fact that he wasn’t at the Tour of the Basque Country, where seemingly all of his major rivals for the Tour crashed, including Primož Roglič, Remco Evenepoel, and Jonas Vingegaard.
Of course, there are a lot of reasons that he is so heavily favoured, and the main point in his favour is that he might be the best rider we’ve ever seen.
He will have to prove himself worthy of that moniker that by overthrowing decades of precedent on the roads of Italy and France over the next month.
