Motivation and Monuments: Why Pogacar’s 2026 schedule is built to keep him hungry

The would-be GOAT's always draw a crowd. Lionel Messi is currently on a commercial tour in India, and his presence in Kolkata sparked a small riot, with spectators at Salt Lake Stadium ripping out seats and flinging them towards the pitch in protest at the mismanagement of the event. “We have got a ticket for 12,000 rupees, but we were not even able to see his face,” complained one fan.

Passions didn’t run quite as high during Tadej Pogačar’s appearance at the UAE Team Emirates-XRG media day in Benidorm on Saturday. At the very least, the seats that had been carefully laid out for journalists in the Sheraton stayed firmly in place throughout his 30-minute press conference. 

Then again, the warm-up acts had hardly stoked the masses into a frenzy. Before Pogačar’s arrival, João Almeida and Isaac del Toro had taken their own, low-key turns at the top table and talked us through their race programmes for 2026 with all the enthusiasm of teenagers talking their parents through their school curriculums in monotone. Attempts to steer the conversation in more colourful directions were thwarted by the dead weight of passive resistance. 

Most of the assembled press pack had been on a tour of training camps in the area in the preceding days, and perhaps we had been spoiled. Remco Evenepoel at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and Juan Ayuso at Lidl-Trek are two of the most engaging interviewees in the peloton, after all, but the contrast in energy between their media appearances and those of UAE’s troika of Grand Tour leaders was striking all the same.

Pogačar was the main event, but he has become understandably less enamoured with the jamboree that awaits him around the world these days. That lethargy around the media game was already evident in the final week of the Tour de France, and it doesn’t seem to have left him in the months since. 

In an excellent piece for Het Nieuwsblad last month, Jan-Pieter De Vlieger captured the short, polite but entirely fruitless exchange between Pogačar and the visiting media in Gran Canaria, where the world champion was picking up a cheque to gladhand participants in a Gran Fondo. On Saturday, at least, Pogačar would provide some concrete details about his race schedule for 2026, but few in attendance expected a whole lot more by way of insight.  

Once the main order of business, the race programme, had been dispensed with, conversation switched to a familiar but tired parlour game – which races Pogačar still needs to tick off in order to “complete” cycling and which races he still wants to win between now and the end of his career.

Pogačar is surely bored of the conceit by now, but he came up with answers all the same. “I think I would choose Roubaix because I won already the Tour four times,” he said when asked between the Hell of the North and another Tour de France. “The difference between zero and one is bigger than the difference between four and five.”

It says something about Pogačar’s supremacy that victories at Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix – the “missing” Monuments – seem like an inevitability at some point in the future. And it goes without saying that anything other than victory in the three stage races currently on his 2026 calendar – the Tour de Romandie, the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de France – would be classed as a massive upset.

That’s the problem with being this much better than everybody else. In 2024 and 2025, he simply turned up to bike races, rode away from the rest and won. As things stand, there is no jeopardy or suspense in the Pogačar story.

Indeed, since Pogačar truly became Pogačar after winning the 2020 Tour, only Jonas Vingegaard has brought true conflict to the narrative. By winning the Tours of 2022 and 2023, Vingegaard exposed hitherto unseen vulnerabilities in Pogačar, and the Slovenian’s arc was all the more compelling as a result. 

In the two years since, Pogačar has seemingly eradicated all weaknesses, and he has run up the score against Vingegaard for the past two Julys to the point that the Dane is heavily considering a Giro d’Italia debut in 2026. Whether he rides the Giro or not, Vingegaard will still be expected at the Tour, of course, and Pogačar dutifully said he hoped to see him there.

“When you’re an athlete doing sport, you always want to fight the best, in the best level, in the best shape, without bad luck and whatever,” Pogačar said. “It confirms more the victory if everybody is there 100%. But he can choose what he wants. I will not call him and say, ‘Hey, Jonas, you need to go to the Tour…’”

Pogačar has expressed a degree of ambivalence towards the business of riding and winning the Tour over the years, but he also accepts that his status as the best bike rider in the world essentially obliges him to line up in the biggest bike race in the world. The Tour was always going to be the central duty of his 2026 schedule, but the rest of the calendar looks to have been designed to keep Pogačar entertained.

The first part of his season is devoted exclusively to his preferred field of one-day racing. His year starts at Strade Bianche, where he is chasing a fourth record victory and then he rides Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Remarkably for a Tour favourite, he won’t line up in a stage race until the Tour de Romandie in late April and he warms up for La Grande Boucle at the revamped, five-day Tour de Suisse.

UAE sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez explained that Pogačar’s debuts at Romandie and Suisse are simply a case of adding a little variety to his calendar. Even the champion, it seems, gets a little bored of winning the same races in the same way. Perhaps his own level of motivation will be his biggest rival in 2026.

“Maybe this calendar shows that we try to win races we don’t have on the palmarès, like Romandie or Suisse, rather than repeat another time the same programme,” Matxin said on Saturday. “He already has the Dauphiné on his palmarès, whereas with Suisse he can try to win another race he doesn’t have on his palmarès.”

In 2025, Pogačar opted against racing the Vuelta a España, citing fatigue, and it’s striking that he will take on relatively few race days in the early part of the year. As things stand, Pogačar would get to the end of the Tour with 37 race days in his legs (it was 43 at the same point in 2025), which leaves the prospect of a Vuelta ride possible if not necessarily probable. 

“After the Tour, there will be a decision based on what the feeling is,” Matxin said. “We’ll take a decision on whether to go to World Championships directly or to ride the Vuelta, it depends on the feeling of Tadej.”

The most striking news to emerge from Saturday’s media day was that Del Toro would make his Tour debut in the service of Pogačar. “The perfection connection,” Matxin smiled. The Mexican has only just turned 22, but he came within a mountain pass of winning the Giro this year. The hierarchy for July is perfectly clear, of course, but his presence in the Tour squad suggests UAE have a succession plan in place.

“He has his own way, own style of riding, and I already admire him as a rider and as a person as well,” said Pogačar, who briefly had Del Toro for company during his indelible solo raid at the World Championships in Kigali in September. “I hope that he continues the same way as he did the last few years already and that he enjoys cycling as much as he’s doing now.”

The question that has hung over Pogačar for the past year or so is whether he still enjoys cycling as much as he did before an entire industry of agents, sponsors, obligations and public appearances sprang up around him. His eagerness to set out early on a group ride on Saturday morning – a lingering Tim Wellens was forced to chase and catch up – suggested that he still does.

“I think after all these years and all these victories, I start to realise that, yeah, we’re making something great,” Pogačar said. “I enjoy that process and I hope I don’t stop writing this book.”