I'm not untouchable, insists peerless Tadej Pogacar as he builds 4min lead

Times

18-07-2025

Here's the part you may find hard to believe.
Each day that he wins a stage or wears the yellow jersey, Tadej Pogacar is obliged to sit in a mobile studio by the finish and do a video conference with journalists at the centre de presse. This is after he has warmed down, done TV interviews, attended to podium duties and gone to anti-doping. Who would blame him for being a little cranky?
He never is.
On Friday he won the 13th stage, a 10.9km mountain time-trial from Loudenvielle to Peyragudes. He rode up a killer of a climb at an average speed of 28km/h . His great rival, Jonas Vingegaard, had one of his better days at the Tour de France but was beaten by 36sec.
Vingegaard was far from despondent. 'I knew it was not my normal level [Hautacam, on Thursday]. It's not like I lost belief in myself, I still believe in myself. I think today I came back to normal. So I have to keep on trying.'
Every other contender lost significant time. Poor Remco Evenepoel was 2min 39sec down and though he remains third overall, he now trails Pogacar by 7:24.
Of those who lost time, Oscar Onley gained the most. In his second Tour de France, the 22-year-old has delivered a coming-of-age performance. At every difficult moment he is where he should be in the race and on the lone ride to Peyragudes, he did well. He finished 2:06 down on Pogacar but recorded the seventh-fastest time of the day and that lifted him from seventh to fifth overall. A place in the top five is not beyond his capabilities.
Where does this latest victory leave Pogacar? Leading the race by 4:07 and heading for another post-race visit to the mobile studio. The second question asks if he's afraid of making enemies in the peloton and might consider backing off now so others might win stages? 'I am not here to make enemies,' he said, softly. 'It's the Tour de France, you can't just back off if there's an opportunity for a stage win.
'On the Tour you never know when is your last day. I will say this honestly: the team pays you not to give away things. There's a big team behind you that supports you and they work every day of their career so you can come to the Tour and win. If I singlehandedly decided to give away every opportunity that we can grab, my team would not be happy.
'If there's an opportunity, you go for it. When I finish my career, I will probably not speak with 99 per cent of the peloton, honestly. I will focus on my close friends and my family when I finish my career.'
This was the week that Scottie Scheffler initiated a thoughtful debate around the ephemeral essence of success in sport. 'It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes,' Scheffler said. 'It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.'
This was no throwaway observation from the world's best golfer but an insight into how difficult it is for him to find meaning in what he does. 'There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life, and you get there, you get to No1 in the world, and they're like, 'What's the point?' I really do believe that, because what is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad?'
Pogacar goes to the Tour of Flanders, a brutal one-day classic over cobbled climbs, and is expected to win. He does. Barely has he finished his warm-down and he's being asked about three upcoming one-day Classics: Paris-Roubaix, Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. At these races it will only be a story if he doesn't win. At Roubaix he is second. The other two, he wins.
He won his first Tour at 21. A kid in the foothills of his career but with enough talent to overturn a 57sec deficit on the penultimate day and win a race no one envisaged him winning. Since then he's been expected to win every Tour de France he's ridden. He won two from four and was as gracious in defeat as he was modest in victory. His career was changed, enriched you could say, by the losses.
After this victory at Peyragudes, his 21st stage win, I ask if, like Scheffler, he wonders about the point of it all? 'I don't know. It is a good question. It is hard to answer. I started cycling when I was eight, nine years old, and I created my life around the bike. I found my closest friends on the bike. I found my girlfriend, now fiancée, through the bike.
'The point is you need to enjoy the moment. The little things, not just the victories. Like he said, when you win, people think about the next win or [say] that you're winning too much. You need to enjoy what you are making the sacrifices for. I think living in the moment is the right answer to this question [of what's the point] and not care too much about what everyone else thinks.'
Pogacar is then asked if he is untouchable. What is he supposed to say? He takes the question calmly. 'If you'd seen me at the 2022 Tour, or 2023, I had bad moments. I cracked. Those years I was second, had stage wins but had those bad moments and I can still have them this year. I wouldn't say I'm untouchable. I will try to be, but there can come a bad day.'
Some wonder how he can be so good? Not me. There's a story told by the UAE sports director Andrej Hauptman of going to watch an 11-year-old Pogacar ride a circuit race in Slovenia with the kid's coach at the time. Hauptman wasn't impressed as the slightly built and skinny Pogacar was off the back of the peloton, furiously trying to catch up. He asked the coach if it was sensible to have him race against older and stronger boys.
'Andrej, he's not off the back. He's attacked from the start and now he's going to lap everyone.'
Another memory is of the Saturday afternoon at La Planche des Belles Filles after his astonishing time-trial victory that gave him his first Tour de France victory. At the media conference he said he would like to thank his parents. 'F the genetics.' He said it with a smile but he meant it. He is far from stupid.
In 2019, his first season with UAE, they took him to the United States for training and to race the Tour of California, which he won.
While in the US, all the UAE riders underwent testing under the supervision of Iñigo San Millán, who at that time was an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. San Millán was particularly interested in discovering the rates at which riders cleared lactate from their fast-twitch muscle fibres.
'One of the measurements I took is for lactate to see how quickly the lactate levels recover after a hard effort,' San Millán has said. 'With Pogacar, I noticed that his lactate recovery capacity was huge. His levels would return to normal after two minutes, while some riders took 20 minutes. That's a great advantage when you're attacking a climb as you can keep on attacking. It's been shown that world-class athletes produce more because they have a higher glycolytic capacity and can also clear it more proficiently. Well, Pogacar has one of the greatest glycolytic capacities I've ever seen.'
Tadej definitely wasn't joking when he thanked his folks.