I worked full-time in cycling journalism for a year before I attended one of Tadej Pogačar‘s races in person at, the first time being at the Canadian one-day races in 2024. Just six minutes into him speaking to the press in Quebec, a missed flight, lost luggage, and a trip to Disneyland Paris had become the topic of conversation.
While the latter never materialised during the three-hour layover he and a few other members of UAE – including his press officer whom he blamed for not wanting to go – had as they corrected their entry requirements, it was a first sign of the casual, nonchalant best rider in the world’s personality I’d come to see on TV interviews and video-call press conferences.
In 2025, my first race coincided with Pogačar’s at the UAE Tour, and though representing the home team, he was markedly more snappy than five months earlier in Canada, unwilling to play ball when questioned about his power numbers and a possible debut at Paris-Roubaix at the pre-race press conference.
But what those seven stages, the majority of which saw him in the red leader’s jersey, gave was a unique insight into the Slovenian. Granted, by the time we reached Jebel Hafeet and the race’s conclusion, he probably wasn’t best pleased to see the seven journalists who’d been waiting for his arrival at a small red tent every afternoon again.
Still, though, be it warming down on his time trial bike or after a 100km ride in the breakaway, it’s a rare level of access to him as a rider and person that I and everyone else in the UAE wouldn’t enjoy with the World Champion for the rest of the year.
His answers are longer, more thoughtful and unlike at the Tour de France, where the written press are often the last group to speak to him through a TV screen in a sweaty gymnasium media centre, where only two or so questions will be allowed, in the UAE you could well be the second or third person to speak to him post-stage.
Andy McGrath, who was working on a biography of the modern-day…
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