No alarms and no surprises, just another Tadej Pogacar exhibition

When Sean Kelly claimed a seventh successive Paris-Nice back in 1988, Vélo Magazine complained jokingly about the sheer predictability of it all. “Kelly would have disgusted Hitchcock,” went the headline. 

But nobody, not even Kelly in that sequence of Paris-Nice wins, has succeeded in divesting cycling of all suspense and jeopardy quite like Tadej Pogačar. His victory at the European Championships on Sunday was his 18th of another imperious season, and the result was never in doubt from the moment he turned up and signed on.

Remco Evenepoel and Belgium did what they could in the opening half of the race to try to make a contest of it, and they succeeded in their stated aim of isolating Pogačar, even if they also knew that would only serve to provoke the Slovenian.

So it proved. On the third ascent of the Côte de Saint Romain de Lerps, Pogačar decided he might as well go about winning the race. Evenepoel followed his seated acceleration for a few hundred metres before he realised his rival was, once again, travelling somewhere he simply could not reach.

Evenepoel is clearly in sparkling form, he is the best time triallist in the world, he had Paul Seixas, Juan Ayuso and Christian Scaroni for company in the chasing group, and there were still 75km to race.

In any other era, those would have been the ingredients for a real bike race. Instead, they were incidental details in yet another Pogačar exhibition. Even when the gap briefly dropped to 25 seconds or so ahead of the next ascent of the Val d’Enfer, there was never a real sense that Pogačar might be reeled in.

And, of course, he simply kicked again on the climb, adding another ten seconds to his advantage by the top and then extending it to a minute shortly afterwards. The gap wouldn’t contract again until Pogačar sat up and started celebrating in the closing kilometres, the point long since proved and the race long since won.

When Chris Froome launched his long-range move over the Colle delle Finestre on the 2018 Giro d’Italia, the attack was bracketed as something from another era. It was a day where the previous logic of the Giro collapsed upon itself and where accumulated fatigue contributed to the enormous time gaps and the failure to marshal a cohesive chase behind. 

There was certainly no repeat of that feat in the following month’s buttoned-down Tour de France. The Finestre, we told ourselves, was simply a once-in-a-generation kind of a day, a wild aberration. 

Pogačar, by contrast, produces these miracles so often that they have become almost mundane. There is nothing remotely normal about a rider attacking alone with 75km to go, easing clear of the best riders in the world and holding them at arm’s length to the finish, yet in the Pogačar era, we have become increasingly desensitised to such efforts.

When Pogačar went solo for 50km at Strade Bianche in 2022, it felt like one of the defining moments of his career. Three and a half years on, it looks simply like a routine win for a rider who regularly makes the biggest bike races feel like sportives for the final two hours.

A week ago in Kigali, Pogačar attacked with over 100km to go and went solo for 66km to win his second successive rainbow jersey. It was a performance of shocking dominance, but it didn’t register anything like the same awe as his equivalent display at the Zurich Worlds the previous year. We’d seen the movie before, we already knew how it was going to end.

By now, Pogačar has run out of ways to surprise us, and one wonders if he is running out of ways to keep himself entertained. He certainly seems to be running out of rivals.

Pogačar seemed to evince a certain boredom at this year’s Tour de France, where, for the first time, Jonas Vingegaard never managed to lay a glove on him. The Dane since won the Vuelta a España and he was touted as a challenger here, but he was dropped with more than 100km still to race.

After Evenepoel caught and passed Pogačar in the Worlds time trial, one wondered if he might have the Slovenian’s measure in the road race. Inevitably, Pogačar offered powerful counterarguments both in Kigali and the Drôme-Ardèche.

Evenepoel is a rider of soaring talent and resolve, and he rode remarkably well in each race: he was 48 seconds clear of bronze in Rwanda and more than three minutes clear of the rest in France. And yet he wasn’t really competing in the same bike race as Pogačar either. 

On Sunday evening, after another heavy defeat at Pogačar’s hand, Evenepoel was reduced to finding consolation in the fact that he had resisted the winning attack for the bones of a kilometre before he had to relent. 

Perhaps only Mathieu van der Poel on the cobbles and at Milan-San Remo is genuinely competing on the same plane as Pogačar, and at this point, one wonders if that relative parity will survive to next Spring. 

In the two seasons since Pogačar began working under the guidance of coach Javier Sola, he has moved further and further clear of his contemporaries. Nothing symbolises the new gap between Pogačar and the rest than the seated acceleration he has added to his armoury these past two years. 

It was in evidence all over again on Sunday afternoon on the Côte de Saint Romain de Lerps. Seated, Pogačar rode with disquieting ease, while Olympic champion Evenepoel was straining simply to stay in the same postcode.

These days, watching a Pogačar race feels like watching Lionel Messi scoring a hat-trick against Osasuna or Mallorca back when he was at his peak. You can appreciate the artistry while still bemoaning the utter lack of competition.

Messi’s arc became more compelling again, of course, once age began to slow him and a little adversity was added to the narrative, forcing him to find new ways to dazzle, like at the 2022 World Cup.

Still only 27 and still firmly in the imperial phase of his career, however, there doesn’t seem to be much dramatic suspense on Pogačar’s horizon just yet. A fifth successive Il Lombardia victory next weekend looks inevitable.  

Nothing about this is normal, but it has become routine.