Pogacar continues boredom-proof Tour build-up at revamped Tour de Suisse

On the eve of last year’s Critérium du Dauphiné, Tadej Pogačar confessed to a degree of weariness with the business of preparing for the biggest bike race of them all. After a spring devoted primarily to chasing his own passion projects at the Classics, he was now knuckling down to his main professional obligation, namely riding and winning the Tour de France.

“Unfortunately, I’m stuck with the Tour every year,” Pogačar said in a video call the day before the race began. He was smiling when he said it, but that didn’t detract from the sense that he was rather less enthusiastic about July racing than he had been about jousting with Mathieu van der Poel et al in March and April.

That didn’t stop Pogačar from crushing the field at the Dauphiné, of course, nor did it prevent him from claiming his fourth Tour with disarming ease the following month. But as the Tour drew on, the story of the race became less about Pogačar’s dominance and more about his waning motivation.

After racking up four stage wins and an unassailable early lead, Pogačar was more measured in his efforts across the final week of the Tour and increasingly jaded in his press conferences. “It is a point that I ask myself why I’m still here,” Pogačar said with three days remaining. “It’s so long, these three weeks. You just count the kilometres to Paris. I cannot wait until it’s all over and I can do some other nice stuff in my life as well.”

It was rare – if not unprecedented – for the yellow jersey to confess to boredom with the Tour itself before the race was even over. Inevitably, it led to all sorts of speculation about Pogačar’s future plans, including murmurs that he might hang up his wheels once the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles were done. 

In truth, Pogačar’s very public declarations of ennui might simply have been his way of telling his UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad that he had no intention of lining up at the following month’s Vuelta a España.

In any case, after a late-summer hiatus, Pogačar returned to one-day racing in September and his (ab)normal service was resumed, with devastating victories at the World Championships, European Champions and Il Lombardia to see out the season. 

But that dichotomy between the one-day racing and stage racing clearly remained, and it weighed heavily on UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s thinking when they sat down with Pogačar last winter to devise his race programme for 2026.

Much has been made of Red Bull’s decision to withhold Remco Evenepoel from racing for 68 days ahead of the Grand Départ, but Pogačar’s early-season schedule was every bit as radical for a Tour contender. 

UAE elected against having Pogačar ride any stages races in the opening months of the season. The habitual tour of duty at the UAE Tour was off the menu, with the world champion instead delaying the start of his season until Strade Bianche.

Pogačar’s stated aim was to try to complete a full set of Monuments, but it was clear that UAE were also keen to ensure his motivation didn’t wane ahead of the main event in July. Head of performance Jeroen Swart’s comment after last year’s Tour seemed to form the thinking behind the new schedule: “The question now is how long we can keep Pogačar at this level, and it's no longer a matter of age, but mainly of motivation.” 

It meant Pogačar didn’t line up in any multi-day race to prepare his Classics campaign. For the first two months of his season, he limited himself to five one-day races, winning four – Strade Bianche, Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège – and placing second at a tumultuous edition of Paris-Roubaix.

And even when Pogačar finally entered the stage racing fray in late April, the programme was designed to offer a stimulus. Pogačar had never raced – and therefore never won – the Tour de Romandie, and so UAE saw it as a logical place to have him start to turn his attention towards the main event in July.

Although Pogačar was, by his admission, a couple of kilos above his usual stage racing weight after a spring spent chasing wins on the cobbles, he was still several rungs above everyone else at the Tour de Romandie. He coolly notched up four stage wins and overall victory without every really needing to extend himself.

It was a sobering message to his Tour rivals, given that Pogačar at that point hadn’t even deigned to train at altitude in 2026. As UAE sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez explained to Domestique, the Tour de Romandie marked a transitional point in Pogačar’s season.

“We made a programme tailored to Tadej and I think the customisation was good in the sense that he focused on one-day racing to begin with, and he ended that cycle with Romandie as an adaptation to the second cycle of his season, which is around the Tour de France,” Matxin said.

Pogačar proceeded to spend a long stint at altitude at Sierra Nevada in May, where anecdotal evidence from his peers at Red Bull suggested that he wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

The Slovenian has since come down from the mountain and now he takes aim at his final race before the Tour. And again, it’s striking that UAE have opted for a new event to keep their leader stimulated. 

The Tour de Suisse is appealing to the completionist in Pogačar because it’s a race he hasn’t won before, but the new, scaled-back format of the event will surely appeal to the occasionally jaded athlete who at times seems to find stage racing a touch too boring for his tastes.

Due to financial considerations and as part of an attempt to, in their words, “future-proof” the race, the Tour de Suisse organisation has scaled the event back from eight stages to five. The new format seems to offer Pogačar the best of both worlds – a WorldTour stage race just before the Tour, but in a more condensed form than the Dauphiné.

All five stages seem to have something to keep Pogačar interested, and he has a couple of likely sparring partners for the first three days at least in Mathieu van der Poel and Tom Pidcock. And on the final weekend, he has two tests seemingly tailormade for a Tour contender – the 23km time trial in Aarburg on stage 4 and then the big mountain finale to Villars-sur-Ollon the next day.

Back in 2022, Pogačar rode the Tour of Slovenia in this same very slot, but when he lost that year’s Tour to Jonas Vingegaard, one school of thought suggested that his procession at the 2.Pro race – which included a game of rock, paper, scissors with teammate Rafal Majka – hadn’t provided him with the kind of exacting workout he really needed before July. 

The contracted Tour de Suisse, by contrast, seems to offer the balance he needs. The level of competition should be enough to tick the physical preparation box, while the brevity of the race avoids making undue mental demands on Pogačar.

As ever with Pogačar, there is very little suspense about this Tour de Suisse. The expectation is that he will win. The only question is by how much and in what way. 

Twelve months ago, when the Dauphiné put Pogačar in a head-to-head contest with Vingegaard, he used the occasion to land a heavy psychological blow ahead of the Tour by dropping his rival on successive summit finishes. 

This Tour de Suisse doesn’t pit Pogačar against any direct rivals for the maillot jaune, but that doesn’t mean the world champion won’t want to send out a message or two. Vingegaard has just warmed up for the Tour with a strikingly comfortable triumph at the Giro d’Italia. Expect Pogačar to respond in kind in Switzerland. He may not always love stage racing, but he has a way of finding motivation all the same.