From weakness to strength? How Tadej Pogacar learned to handle the heat

Temperatures rose above 30 degrees on the road to Sondrio, but while much of the peloton struggled, the Slovenian rode away.

He attacked with 69.3 kilometres remaining, caught and dropped early escapee Fredrik Dversnes and finished more than two minutes ahead of Richard Carapaz. It was his fourth longest successful solo.

“Wa was da?” Tiesj Benoot said at the finish to HLN.

What was that?

UAE Team Emirates-XRG had already torn the race apart on the opening climb, reducing the front group to around 25 riders. Pogačar knew then that the legs were good.

“When Domen Novak, Nils Politt and Tim Wellens were going really deep, I could feel that I was having a good day,” he said.

After spotting a gap following an intermediate sprint, Pogačar and Brandon McNulty decided to test the race. Pogačar soon continued alone and effectively settled the general classification on day one.

The dominance was familiar. His command of the heat was not.

Pogačar's relationship with extreme heat has not always been straightforward. Earlier in his career, high temperatures were sometimes presented as one of the few circumstances in which he appeared vulnerable. 

The most famous example came during the 2022 Tour de France, when he cracked on the Col du Granon during a brutally hot Alpine stage and lost the yellow jersey to Jonas Vingegaard.

It would be too simplistic to blame that defeat solely on the temperature. Tactical pressure, altitude, nutrition and the repeated attacks from Jumbo-Visma all played significant roles. Still, the idea that heat could reduce Pogačar's performance became part of the conversation around him.

In Sondrio, there was little evidence of that old vulnerability.

“It was pretty hot,” Pogačar said at the post stage press conference in quotes collected by In de Leiderstrui. “After the descents, it felt like someone was blowing a hairdryer into your face.”

He suffered in the heat too, but he and his team appeared to handle the conditions better than most.

“The team had people positioned at the right points with bottles,” he said. “We could take a lot of water and pour it over me. My teammates took good care of me. Keeping the body temperature low was the key, and we managed that well.”

That process has taken years to refine. Living in Monaco on the Côte d’Azur also gives Pogačar regular exposure to the kind of intense summer heat the riders faced on the opening stage.

“After the Tour, it gets incredibly hot there in August,” he said. “Sometimes it is about surviving from day to day, even in training. You plan your route so you can pass by home and refill your bottles. That has helped me.”

UAE have evolved too. Cooling is no longer treated as a simple matter of handing a rider a cold bottle. Teams study core temperature, hydration, clothing, ice strategies and the location of feeding points. On a day like this, the organisation around the leader can be almost as important as the legs of the leader himself.

“The team has made a lot of progress with the type of bottles we use and the way the cooling is organised,” Pogačar said. “I do not get heatstroke in the middle of a race anymore, which happened more easily in the past.”

Uno-X Mobility sports director Christian Andersen believed the conditions widened the differences between Pogačar and his rivals.

“People were boiling over,” Andersen told Danish outlet Feltet. “Not many riders here have been racing in this kind of heat yet this year. I am not saying he did not suffer from it too, but the heat made the differences bigger.”

The conditions in Switzerland hurt everyone. Pogačar simply turned them into another source of separation.

For his rivals, that may be the most discouraging conclusion of all. They are not only trying to defeat the strongest rider in the world. They are trying to defeat a rider who continues to improve at the things that once made him look human.