Tadej Pogacar drives in his own league

In the past few days, the plush lions have piled up in the front area of ​​the UAE team. Tadej Pogacar has been wearing the yellow jersey from the main sponsor of the Tour de France since the eighth stage after each section. In 2020 he finished the Tour of France as the winner, but this year he topped this performance again.

Once again, Pogacar achieved three stage wins, two in the mountains and one in the time trial. As in the previous year, he is the best young professional, but was even able to secure the mountain jersey and this time it was clear that the 22-year-old Slovene would win the race by far.

Only the green jersey was out of reach for him, the Briton Mark Cavendish wore it on Sunday on the last stage to Paris on the Champs-Élysées. There the Belgian Wout van Aert from the Jumbo-Visma team won, it was his third stage win.

“You have to go way back in cycling to find similar achievements. He drove in a league of his own on this tour ”, stated David Brailsford with a view to Pogacar. The boss of Ineos Grenadiers, once the dominant racing team on the tour, now finished with third place overall and without a stage win, really admires Pogacar.

“You first have to have the courage to risk such an attack 34 kilometers from the finish. I have a lot of respect for him, ”said the Welshman, referring to the eighth stage of this tour.

An attack as a key moment

The attack on Col de Romme and the expansion of the lead on the following Col de la Colombiere were the key moments of this tour. Pogacar got three minutes and twenty seconds on both climbs and was then allowed to slip on the yellow jersey.

The all-time record on the Col de Romme of 26 minutes and 29 seconds caused some frowns. The previous best time of 26:49 minutes was held by the Schleck brothers, Alberto Contador and Andreas Klöden, who drove in the 2009 Tour de France. The stage at that time, however, had a more difficult profile. Pogacar outpaced his immediate pursuers by a minute and seven seconds.

“If you look at their data, you can see that they didn’t give everything,” said David Walsh, British cycling journalist and the first to seriously scrutinize Lance Armstrong, during a conversation in the tour’s press center. According to its own information, Walsh also has some performance data from Pogacar. And he thinks it is understandable.

At the Col de la Colombiere, Pogacar got about two minutes out of the stunned pursuers. He missed the absolute best time by just two seconds. That was achieved in 2018 by Irishman Dan Martin. The chasing group at the time, led by Team Sky, only needed three seconds longer.

That means: This year Pogacar was at the same level as Team Sky from 2018. You can also see it this way: In 2018, the mountain range of the British racing team and a handful of other team’s ranked drivers were on the same level as the 2021 team Soloist Pogacar acted.

He was a soloist because most of his rivals were damaged by falls and some were even eliminated. Many of their helpers felt no different. “Of course you notice that. There is a lack of power, there is no dominance ”, analyzes Matt White, Team Principal of BikeExchange.

Pogacar’s performance is still being questioned. The doping analyst Antoine Vayer extrapolates the times on the mountain and the body weight of individual drivers to individual watts and transfers these values ​​to a standardized body weight of 78 kilograms for better comparability.

With some values ​​in the range of Lance Armstrong

According to these values, Pogacar actually moves partly in the range of Lance Armstrong. That is why Vayer likes to call the Slovenes “Pogastrong”.

However, with climbs lasting more than 30 minutes, which Vayer takes as the basis for his well-known doping radar, Pogacar has only been in the range of 430 to 450 watts once. Vayer describes it as the “orange zone of miracles”.

That wasn’t the tour, but Pogacar’s stage win in Prato di Tivo at this year’s Tirreno Adriatico. In what Vayer calls the “mutant range” from 450 watts upwards, Pogacar does not, at least in the published figures, make any progress.

He wasn’t invulnerable on this tour either. At Mont Ventoux he found a conqueror in Jonas Vingegaard. There were further borders for Pogacar in the Pyrenees. Although he scored two stage wins there, he also admitted: “I actually wanted to attack earlier, but I just couldn’t get away.” That suggests that he may not be the overrun that many have already named him.