The two most striking lines from Tadej Pogačar’s long-awaited pre-season press conference on Saturday came right at the beginning of his answers and right at the end.
Asked whether he’d prefer to win Paris-Roubaix a first time or the Tour de France a record-equalling fifth time, if forced to choose, the UAE Team Emirates-XRG leader said he’d pick victory in the Hell of the North.
Then half an hour later, when responding to a question on whether he realised that achievements like taking podiums in all five Monuments in 2025 meant he was making history, Pogačar also answered: “Yeah, I think after all these years and all these victories, I start to realise that, yeah, we’re making something great. I enjoy that process and I hope I don’t stop writing this book.”
With each year of runaway success, though, the question of how Pogačar adds another chapter to an already hefty tome of historical achievements becomes simultaneously more straightforward and more complicated. As he agreed, if he wins Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo at some point in his career, there won’t be much more for him left when it comes to major success, barring perhaps the Vuelta a España and some week-long stage races.
Yet the very fact that Pogačar is running out of fresh fields to conquer begs the question of how to avoid falling into what could become a more tedious cycle of simple repetition. As UAE team manager Joxean Fernández Matxin told Domestique on Saturday, much of what the calendar is designed to ensure is that Pogačar’s season-long motivation remains high.
It’s worth noting too that whilst great champions like Pogačar are all but defined by their ability to make the extremely difficult look straightforward, pure talent in almost any walk of life, let alone one as tough as bike racing, will only get you so far. UAE head of performance Jeroen Swart pointed out on Saturday just how hard Pogačar trains as well as he races, and staying at the top of the game is arguably even harder than actually getting there, too.
Furthermore, not absolutely everything went Pogačar’s way in 2025, either, for all an awful lot did. The UAE leader’s slightly lacklustre third week of the Tour, for example, was hampered by a knee injury that could have cost him the race. Subsequent plans to possibly race the Vuelta a España last autumn – which would have made 2025’s level of achievements even more stratospheric – were quietly dropped in early August. If Paris-Roubaix was…
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