Tadej Pogacar dominated Giro d’Italia, but ‘greatest’ debate can wait
It takes a rare breed of athlete to inspire a whole new genre of vocabulary.
Such is their greatness, they expose the limitations not only of their rivals, but of language itself. So it has been over the last three weeks of the Giro d’Italia, one of the toughest bike races in the world.
Pogcineration, Pogification, Pogbliteration have all been added to the cycling lexicon, after a complete and unthreatened dominance of the race by Tadej Pogacar.
So rarified a species is the two-time Tour de France winner that regular superlatives, if there can ever be such a thing, no longer do him justice. He has exhausted our linguistic limits. You can only begin to imagine what he has done to his rivals on the road.
Pogacar is thought to have been paid handsomely by the race organisers to take part in his first Giro and he has repaid that investment multiple times over.
Not only did the Slovenian win six of the 21 available stages, he volunteered as lead-out man for the team’s sprinter, won the overall race by a margin of almost ten minutes, the biggest winning margin in almost six decades, and looked like he still had reserves left in the tank.
And it’s those reserves that now become the subject of fascination and scrutiny, because he will need every last drop to carry out his masterplan of doubling up on the Giro and the Tour de France, a feat not achieved since 1998.
Because yes, the Giro d’Italia is a huge deal in cycling terms, but make no mistake, the biggest prize is still to be claimed. And it’s one Pogacar has fallen agonisingly short of in the last two years. If he has looked head, shoulders, knees and toes above the rest of the already world-class peloton in Italy, that is mostly because his main rival wasn’t playing the game.
Jonas Vingegaard, the man who beat Pogacar by a whopping seven-and-a- half minutes on the roads of France last year, has been training and recovering from horrific injuries in his own build-up to what should be the most epic of showdowns.
Vingegaard is the back-to-back defending Tour de France champion and, in my opinion, the one rider who can easily breathe the same rarefied air as Pog.
Others, such as the Belgian superstar Remco Evenepoel and three-time Vuelta winner Primoz Roglic hover around that summit, but the Dane is the only man to have given Pogacar a full and frantic fight in recent years.
Vingegaard suffered a terrifying fall while racing in April and has since been battling back from a collapsed lung and broken collarbone. His team Visma-Lease a Bike announced this week that he will only take to the Grand Depart if he is 100 per cent recovered.
Should that be the case, then we will have a much better idea of where Tadej Pogacar sits in this sport’s history books.
He has made no secret of his ambition to become the best rider ever and his dominance in Italy pushed that project forward, but he is not there yet.
All of which is not to say Tadej hasn’t faced quality opposition in the last month. The Colombian Dani Martínez has had something of a coming of age to finish second and the former Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas is no slouch of a rider to claim yet another Grand Tour podium.
But Thomas himself admitted he was starting to feel his age, as he marked his 38th birthday last week with a double ascent of the brutal Monte Grappa.
The competition behind Tadej has been fierce but no one else has really run close. This hasn’t been a surprise.
Pogacar and Vingegaard were in a world and class of their own at last year’s Tour and one rider without the other only serves to accentuate that gap between the top and the best of the rest.
Admittedly, what marks Tadej out even alongside his greatest rival, is his ability to win on the cobbles as well as the climbs, on the roads of Flanders as well as in France, and also everywhere in between.
He is the ultimate all-rounder. We don’t see Grand Tour winners even attempting the one-day classics these days, never mind winning them by the margin Pogacar has managed.
But this is a sport which traditionally celebrates, or bemoans, a champion’s dominating, suffocating reign before it’s barely begun.
We so quickly forget the lessons of history, and the sport around us, and declare Lady Luck and human rivals alike little match for whomsoever is currently the dominant force.
Yes, while Tadej is one of the sport’s best, he will still need at least another Tour de France triumph under his belt before we start sharpening the quill for that particular page of the history books.
Tadej had a magnificent Giro and won by a margin not witnessed in 59 years. But the best of all time? Let’s chat after one further dance with the Dane. Pogination may be close but we’re not there just yet.
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