Pogacar carries his burden more lightly to extend Tour de France reign

There was a certain gloom around the festivities on the final weekend of last year’s Tour de France, where Tadej Pogačar gave the impression of a man feeling increasingly condemned by his own talent. 

The great power of being the best bike rider on the planet brought with it the great responsibility of racing – and winning – the biggest bike race of them all, whether he enjoyed it or not. And at various points last year, Pogačar made it abundantly clear that he was not enjoying it anymore. 

Pogačar began to look bored of his own dominance, cutting an increasingly gloomy figure in his post-race press conferences and even in the race itself.  He even went so far as to confess he couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over. 

“His sulking, his grumbling, his general bad mood for several days has been clouding and disrupting the atmosphere at the end of the Tour de France,” L’Équipe complained as the race approached Paris. 

Small wonder that on the final day of the Tour, UAE Team Emirates-XRG head of performance Jeroen Swart noted that the biggest challenge for Pogačar in the years ahead would be keeping his head in the game rather than driving his body to new extremes. “It’s no longer a question of age, but mainly of motivation,” he said. That thought informed what UAE did next.

Jonas Vingegaard’s resurgence was real, Paul Seixas’s emergence was rapid, and Remco Evenepoel’s Red Bull reboot ultimately paid off, but Pogačar’s biggest rival in 2026 was always going to be his own motivation. It was UAE’s job to figure out how to stop him from beating himself.

The first step came in the immediate aftermath of last year’s Tour. UAE, it seems, were initially keen to send Pogačar to the Vuelta a España, but the rider himself was firmly against the idea, which might have contributed to the performative element of his malaise in the last week of last year’s Tour, though a nagging knee injury was also a factor.

Whatever the reason, UAE were wise not to force the issue. Instead of grinding through a duel with Vingegaard at the Vuelta, Pogačar focused on one-day racing in the autumn, putting together arguably his most impressive sequence yet on successive weekends at the Worlds, European Championships and Il Lombardia.

More strikingly, Pogačar’s Classics fixation was indulged again this spring, when his programme was limited to five one-day races. His first stage race was the Tour de Romandie in late April, and that preceded his first altitude camp of the year in May. His final pre-Tour build-up was the five-day Tour de Suisse rather than a slog at the Dauphiné. UAE realised that less could be more with their star man. 

Even before the Tour began, the question really wasn’t whether Pogačar would win it all again, but how and by how much. And, with an eye to the future, could he win the Tour without it turning into the same mentally draining chore as 2025?

Not unlike Peter Sagan, his predecessor as the impish avatar of cycling-as-entertainment, Pogačar is both instantly familiar and strangely unknowable. The front-facing public persona is almost cartoonish, the smiling kid from Slovenia with the tuft sticking out of his helmet, but his interior moods are harder to gauge, and his opinions are rarely expressed with any real force.

In much the same vein as Sagan, Pogačar regularly comes across as being bored when talking to the media, but it’s not immediately clear if that’s simply because he’s jaded by our questions or because he’s jaded by the whole business. 

It’s a heavy thing for a man to have to turn up and be Tadej Pogačar every time he pins on a number. The world champion is compelled to put on a show every time he races. The final week of last year’s Tour, when he briefly seemed to lose interest in chasing stage wins, was the first time he publicly rebelled against the burden he carries.

The apparent existential crisis – apparent, because Pogačar never articulated it then and has brushed it off since – was the elephant in the room ahead of the 2026 season in general and the Tour in particular. Could Pogačar keep destroying allcomers without destroying a piece of himself?

The past three weeks appear to suggest that he can. From Barcelona to Paris, Pogačar seemed altogether lighter of spirit than in 2025, with the prevailing mood far closer to the more playful dominance of 2024. 

The presence of Isaac del Toro as a foil seemed to help the champion’s humour. Pogačar clearly revelled in gifting the Mexican victory on Montjuïc on stage 2, even if the gesture earned the admonishment of L’Équipe for its “irreverence” to the Tour.

In reality, it was simply a reflection of the reality of this Tour. Pogačar could do as he pleased and when he pleased. He made a mockery of ASO’s backloaded route by essentially sealing overall victory over the Col du Tourmalet on stage 6. From there, his Tour was about choosing his moments to run up the score, choosing his moments to indulge his cannibalistic instincts, and choosing when to reward Del Toro’s loyalty.

The rest of the peloton also seems to have resigned itself to the reality of Pogačar’s supremacy. Visma Lease a Bike are not the collective force of old, riders like Evenepoel were racing for second place and Seixas is still only 19. The old complaints about Pogačar and UAE’s greed have died down too. Everybody knows there’s nothing to be done.

This was a race entirely devoid of dramatic tension, despite ASO’s attempts to engineer suspense with the route. Criticism that Thierry Gouvenou failed to Pogačar-proof the course is akin to complaining about the rain on a holiday in Galway; some things in this world are simply inevitable.

Once Pogačar produced his astonishing solo on the opening day of the Tour de Suisse in June, there was never any doubt that he would win the Tour de France at a canter. His triumph here was arguably his most complete yet, his dominance its most total. There was never so much as a glimmer of vulnerability, not even when his UAE squad was beset by illness in the final week. 

That impregnability leads to assumptions of invincibility, and that brings its own issues. When Pogačar wins, there is rarely any reflection on the day’s victory. Instead, the discussion immediately turns to his next goal, the next world he wants to conquer. 

We saw that most clearly when Pogačar won at Alpe d’Huez on Friday, smashing Marco Pantani’s 31-year-old record in the process. When he was asked in the flash interview afterwards if he would double up at the Alpe the following day, it was hard not to think of a streaming service immediately queuing up the next episode. 

The 2020s Tour is relentless and the expectations of the industry around Pogačar are constant. In that light, it maybe wasn’t so surprising that Pogačar opted against racing for the win the following day, preferring instead to spend the afternoon moonlighting as a super domestique for Del Toro, as though stage 20 of the Tour were an episode of the Secret Millionaire. 

Afterwards, Pogačar suggested that riding on the front for 60km to preserve Del Toro’s third place had been the highlight of his Tour. It’s good public relations to say that, of course, but maybe there was some truth in it too. At the very least, it was a rare day devoted to emotions rather than to numbers. 

Last year, Pogačar left the impression that his Tour had been a joyless grind. This year, the final image was a happier one, as if sharing the road with Del Toro had lightened the burden in some way.

Pogačar joined the elite club of five-time Tour winners with his victory in Paris on Sunday, and like all his predecessors, his reign hasn’t met with total acclaim. Serial winners in any sport are never universally loved, and after his victory at Le Lioran on Bastille Day, Pogačar claimed he had been booed by spectators on the roadside. “To all the booers who are there, they just give more boost to my teammates. They put wood on the fire,” said Pogačar, who surely knows by now that a few jeers in July are simply part of the cost of doing business for a Tour dominator.

So too are occasionally invasive anti-doping controls. Ahead of stage 15 to Plateau de Solaison, Pogačar’s sleep was interrupted by a surprise 5am visit from ITA testers, while his rival Vingegaard had been woken at 2am.

The episode led to the biggest polemic of the Tour, even greater than the discussion over the soaring temperatures that now repeatedly blight the race as the climate crisis escalates. Pogačar was initially sanguine about the invasiveness of the test – “The guys doing the control are just doing their jobs” – but his attitude hardened when Vingegaard crashed out later in the day, and he floated the unprovable hypothesis that the sleep disruption had been a significant contributory factor.

There had been a provision for nighttime testing in the rule book for more than a decade, but this Tour appears to be the first time it was applied in practice. It’s not clear exactly why the ITA decided to reach for the measure in 2026, and there was predictable opposition to the tests from the riders’ union the CPA. 

But rigorous testing is essential if pro cycling is to continue to trumpet its own credibility at a time when speeds are ratcheting upwards at such an astonishing rate. After all, this Tour was the fastest in history – average speed 43.326km/h – and it also included the fastest-ever road stage and the fastest-ever ascent of Alpe d’Huez. 

Pogačar seemed to accept as such when he outlined that his nighttime control was simply part of a long sequence of tests he has faced, and he revisited the topic in Paris on Sunday evening.

“The 5am control is a little bit weird but definitely not the weirdest,” he said. “Since I began riding the Tour in 2020, we’ve had crazy controls. Before queen stages, in almost every Tour that I did – I think four or five times out of seven – there were controls on the bus 30 minutes before the stage, so that for me this is a bit even weirder. But they’re doing their job and I mean, it’s part of my life.” 

Pogačar has seen it all by now, of course, seven Tour appearances and five Tour wins into his career. And the same question that followed his most previous Tour triumphs is the natural booked to this latest exhibition – how much longer will this go on?

Still only 27, Pogačar is the same age now as Miguel Induráin was when he won the first of his five Tours. In theory, Pogačar could reach double figures, even allowing for the development of Seixas, Del Toro and the next generation.

In practice, this dominance will surely end sooner and more suddenly than that. Eddy Merckx, Pogačar’s most obvious antecedent in terms of career trajectory, won his last Tour at 29, and collapse of his regime came suddenly and definitively at Pra-Loup in 1975.

UAE’s task is to delay inevitable passing of the mantle for as long as they possibly can, and this year, as last, maintaining Pogačar’s appetite appears to be the key to that operation. Last year, the joy had drained from Pogačar’s efforts, but this time out, the mood music was lighter. If the 2025 Pogačar recalled the exhausted Lionel Messi in the final throes of his Barcelona career, his 2026 iteration looks to have more in common with the footballer’s late-career resurgence when his priority shifted entirely towards the more emotive mission of winning the World Cup with Argentina.

Although he has a contract until 2030, on Sunday night Pogačar again returned to the idea of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics as a landmark moment in his career, if not necessarily its endpoint. 

For those labouring under his yoke, at least two more years of servitude seem almost certain. But on the evidence of Pogačar’s ease on this Tour – on the bike and off it – there looks to be no end in sight.