Pogacar resumes 'normal' service with another Worlds win from another era

In hindsight, the question wasn’t whether Tadej Pogačar would win the World Championships road race in Kigali, but how and by how much.

His subdued showing in last week’s time trial raised the prospect of a plot twist or two along the way, but on a course as demanding as this, the probability of a deviation from the predicted ending was low.

Ultimately, Pogačar could have won this Worlds any way he needed to win it, just like the best writers find the right form for the kind of story they need to tell. “The novel always wins on points, while the short story must win by a knockout,” the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar once said.

The long and the short of this Worlds was that Pogačar did a bit of both, knocking out most rivals with the by-now familiar seated acceleration on Mont Kigali with 104km to go, and then steadily working the scorecard thereafter.

Remco Evenepoel’s Belgian team had whittled down the peloton ahead of Mont Kigali and they must have felt they were doing a decent job of isolating Pogačar from his Slovenian guard as the climb began.

But theirs was a pyrrhic victory. Like in Zurich a year ago, Pogačar simply saw his relative isolation as an opportunity to indulge his own instincts and go on the attack from distance. Evenepoel’s mechanical issues, meanwhile, meant that he couldn’t follow, at least not for long. Game over.

When Pogačar pulled off the same heist in Zurich twelve months ago, there was a touch of jeopardy about the whole enterprise. On that occasion, he surprised by attacking with 100km to go and he showed signs of flagging in the finale after spending the last 51km alone.

The sequel didn’t have the same drama or suspense. Sequels rarely do. This time out, Pogačar bade farewell to trade teammate Isaac del Toro (Mexico) with 66km to go, but there was no hint of weakness on the final three laps of the race. 

At no point did it look like Pogačar was hanging on. If anything, he gave the alarming impression that he could have gone around for a couple of more laps and run up the score by even more.

By day’s end, Pogačar had secured his second straight rainbow jersey, and he had become the first man to win the Tour-Worlds double for two years in succession. His 66km solo winning break was also the third longest in Worlds history after Vittorio Adorni’s indelible 90km effort in Imola in 1968 and Georges Ronsse’s 70 km attack in 1928.

The course, deemed by many to be the toughest in Worlds history, had some 5,475m of total climbing, yet Pogačar’s average speed was in excess of 42kph. Only 30 riders finished, the lowest since the dizzying Duitama Worlds of 1995.

Evenepoel, second at 1:28, was the only rider to finish within two minutes of Pogačar, and the gap to Tom Pidcock in 10th place was in excess of nine minutes. Time gaps from another era, produced by a rider from another planet. 

But as ever with Pogačar, the numbers say everything and nothing at the same time. The visual impression felt just as telling in Kigali, just as it has done across the past two seasons, from the Tour of Flanders to the Tour de France, from Liège to Lombardia. The superlatives have long since been exhausted to describe the almost absurd ease with which Pogačar presses clear and wins bike races these days.

On the back of his sobering Tour de France defeats to Jonas Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023, Pogačar has become a different rider since he switched to Javier Sola’s coaching in the winter of 2023. Despite the immense quality of Vingegaard and Evenepoel, it seems increasingly clear that Pogačar’s biggest rival is Pogačar himself. 

And, his post-Tour malaise notwithstanding, there is little sign of that motivation waning to any serious degree, and certainly not in one-day races.

That point was only reiterated this week in Rwanda. Pogačar was always likely to respond forcefully to his (relative) humiliation in last Sunday’s time trial, when he was caught and passed by Evenepoel. 

But his retort here wasn’t really aimed at humiliating Evenepoel or anybody else. If anything, Pogačar simply seemed to be proving a point, to himself as much as to the watching world.

Argentina assistant manager Pablo Aimar’s eulogy for Lionel Messi’s ability to motivate himself could just as easily be applied to Pogačar: “Messi must think there’s still some little kid who has never seen him play, so he says: ‘Let’s do something special so that kid leaves with a memory.’”

So it was for Pogačar on Sunday. If last week’s time trial was an aberration, then this abnormally dominant victory was ‘normal’ service for Pogačar. A chilling thought.

All week, there had been mounting speculation that this Worlds might prove to be duel between Pogačar and Evenepoel. They occupied the top two places alright, but after Mont Kigali, they were riding in two very different races.

Nobody, not even Evenepoel himself, can truly say if the result would have been any different had he not broken his saddle ahead of the climb. But it is clear that Evenepoel’s pursuit was hindered by his repeated bike changes, and the race was over as a contest by the time he finally secured a reliable steed for himself.

From there, Evenepoel rode admirably, taking responsibility for the doomed pursuit of Pogačar, slowly toasting the few riders who were able to hold his wheel and then soloing away with 20km to remain.

To paraphrase another sage Argentinian, the World Cup winner turned columnist Jorge Valdano, when Evenepoel rides as courageously as that, he has permission to lose. But his performance was far from flawless, and, in particular, his management of his mechanical mishaps was misguided.

It’s one thing to be frustrated by repeated bike problems, but electing to stop at the roadside and wait for a replacement machine was the kind of error a rider of Evenepoel’s ambition simply cannot afford to make in a race as punishing as this one. 

It’s testament to his ability to reset that he managed to get back into the race at all, but a cooler head in that moment might – might – have brought him a little closer to Pogačar by day’s end. 

Evenepoel’s dreams of a rainbow jersey double will have to wait for another year, but he has an immediate rematch with Pogačar at next week’s European Championships in the Drôme-Ardêche. 

On the evidence of Kigali, only one outcome looks possible, but that won’t dissuade Evenepoel, who blinked back tears of disappointment and frustration beyond the finish line on Sunday. He was soundly beaten by Pogačar, but still not resigned to that state. An increasing rarity in this era.