🇸🇮Tadej
Pogačar

On the final time trial of the 2020 Tour de France — Stage 20, from Lure to La Planche des Belles Filles — Tadej Pogačar was 57 seconds behind Primož Roglič in the general classification with one day left to race. He had never won a Tour de France. He was twenty-one years old. He put on his time trial helmet, clipped into his pedals, and proceeded to ride one of the greatest individual performances in the Tour's 107-year history: he gained nearly two minutes on Roglič across 36 kilometres of rolling terrain, swept past him in the final climb, and crossed the finish line in the yellow jersey with tears running down his face. It was his first Tour de France. He had been a professional cyclist for two years. The cycling world understood immediately that it was watching something different — not just a rider of the first rank, but a once-in-a-generation talent rewriting what the sport's upper boundary looks like.

Tadej Pogačar was born on September 21, 1998, in Komenda, a small town in central Slovenia. Slovenia is a small nation — two million people — with a cycling culture that punches extraordinarily above its weight. Pogačar grew up in a country where Jure Robic won the Race Across America five times and where cycling is treated as a national sport of consequence. He joined the local cycling club in Komenda at a young age, showed immediate talent, and developed through the Slovenian junior and under-23 systems before joining the UAE Team Emirates as a twenty-year-old professional in 2019. In his debut season, he finished third at the Vuelta a España and won three stages. He was twenty years old. The next year, he won the Tour de France.

What distinguishes Pogačar from his contemporaries — and what invites the comparisons to Eddy Merckx that have followed him since his early twenties — is the completeness of his ability. He climbs at a level that places him among the best pure climbers of any era. His time trial power is sufficient to match the best specialists against the clock. He can sprint from a reduced group at the top of a mountain finish. He can read a race tactically at a level that rivals far older and more experienced. He can attack from improbable distances, sustain the attack, and arrive at the line with energy to spare. He won Il Lombardia — cycling's most technically demanding one-day Monument — four consecutive times from 2021 to 2024. He won Liège-Bastogne-Liège three times. He won Strade Bianche. He has won across all terrains, all durations, and all race formats.

The 2021 Tour de France was Pogačar's most dominant performance. He won eight stages — a number not achieved since Merckx — took the yellow, polka dot, and white jerseys simultaneously, and finished three hours ahead of the average GC contender. He attacked when he did not need to attack. He rode away from climbers in the mountains, rode away from time trialists against the clock, and demonstrated the kind of total mastery of a three-week race that the sport had not seen since the 1970s. He was twenty-two. The comparisons to Merckx, once tentative, became explicit. Cycling journalists who had covered the sport for thirty years struggled to find historical context for what they were watching.

The 2022 and 2023 Tours de France were won by his compatriot and sometime rival Jonas Vingegaard, who produced two performances of his own that were exceptional by any prior standard — the Tour of 2022 and 2023 was the most competitive stage racing seen since the Merckx era, with two riders pushing each other to performances that would have comfortably won any previous edition. The rivalry between Pogačar and Vingegaard elevated both. Pogačar responded in 2024 by winning the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia in the same season — a Grand Tour double achieved by only a handful of riders ever, and done at twenty-five years old, with the clear implication that his career is still ascending.

Pogačar races with a joy that is visible and that is relatively unusual at the highest level of professional sport. He smiles on climbs. He attacks when he is already winning by a comfortable margin. He has said in multiple interviews that he simply loves racing and that winning is a consequence of doing what he loves fully, without reservation. This disposition — which might look naive in a lesser rider but is underwritten in Pogačar's case by physiological gifts and technical preparation of the highest order — makes him perhaps the most watchable cyclist since Merckx. His career trajectory at twenty-five suggests he may, before it is over, stand alongside or above the greatest riders the sport has produced. He is, at the time of writing, the most compelling argument cycling has that it is still living through one of its golden ages.