'It makes me angry' - Bernal frustrated and inspired by racing in Pogacar era

Egan Bernal has confessed to a degree of frustration at competing against Tadej Pogačar, though he added that it was an honour to race in the same era as the Slovenian. 

Although Bernal preceded Pogačar on the roll of honour of the Tour de France, the pair have never been direct rivals in a Grand Tour. Injury forced Bernal to abandon Pogačar’s debut Tour in 2020, and the Colombian opted to race and win the Giro d’Italia in 2021. 

Bernal’s career was then interrupted by the horrific injuries he sustained in a training crash in January 2022, and he has battled to return to his old level ever since. In 2025, he enjoyed his best Grand Tour finish in four years when he placed seventh at the Giro, and he won a stage of the Vuelta a España.

In 2025, Bernal competed against Pogačar at the World Championships, Tre Valli Varesine and Il Lombardia, and he conceded that the Slovenian was operating on a different plane to the rest.

“He’s on another level. When you compete against him, many times he makes it seem like you’re bad,” Bernal told Colombian television show Despierta Win. “It makes me angry: you’re giving it your all, and this guy takes off like nothing happened.

“But it’s cool to compete against him, he pushes the rest of us to want to improve. It’s cool that we get to see the Pogacar era.”

Bernal offered an upbeat assessment of his 2025 campaign, which saw him collect his first victories since his Giro triumph four years earlier. He began the year with wins in both the time trial and road race at the Colombian championships, he rode strongly at the Giro, and he claimed a defiant stage win on the Vuelta.

“This year, I felt like I started to be myself again; I felt stronger,” Bernal said. “I feel different. This year, I went to the Giro, finished seventh, and I went to the Vuelta aiming for the podium. It didn’t happen, but I still believe that one day I can win again.”

Bernal missed most of the 2022 season after sustaining fractured vertebrae, a fractured femur, chest trauma and a punctured lung in a training crash near Bogotá, and he was still battling to regain his racing shape through 2023 and 2024.

However, the 28-year-old was reluctant to say how much the crash had affected his career, pointing to how he had already been nursing a nagging back injury in 2020 and 2021.

“It’s hard to say, I was dealing with back pain,” he said. “I had a herniated disc, and I didn’t know whether I’d need surgery or not. We realised it was very serious: it was pinching a nerve, and that was causing the pain. Even so, in 2021, I went to the Giro d’Italia with that pain and won it. I went to the Vuelta a España and finished sixth. The plan for 2022 was to go to the Tour de France, and then what happened, happened.”