Pogacar, Paris-Roubaix and the 'toughest challenge of them all'

None of this is remotely normal, but we have somehow grown used to it. Tadej Pogačar routinely does things that seemed impossible, or at least improbable, barely a generation ago. 

Everything feels like a foregone conclusion for Pogačar these days, and it was striking that talk was already turning to Paris-Roubaix at his pre-Tour of Flanders press conference last Friday. True, he still had to attend to the minor matter of beating Mathieu van der Poel and Remco Evenepoel in the Flemish Ardennes, but few doubted that he would do so. The race was a gripping one, but the outcome was still inevitable, as Pogačar dropped Van der Poel on the Kwaremont once again to win the Ronde for the third time.

Pogačar’s deliberately scaled back Spring schedule, however, was primarily about breaking his duck at Milan-Sanremo and Paris-Roubaix. By achieving part one of that mission on the Riviera last month, Pogačar has already overcome the most intractable obstacle between him and a full set of Monuments, a fact he acknowledged in Kortrijk last Friday.

“Before Sanremo was the hardest to win, but now we can take this away, luckily,” Pogačar said. “I think from now on, Roubaix will be the toughest challenge of them all.”

The subtlety of Milan-Sanremo, a race of strategy as much as of strength, had repelled Pogačar over the years. But after a maddening series of near misses in which he had changed the very dynamic of the race, Pogačar found a way to win by bludgeoning his way over the Cipressa and the Poggio. Not even a crash in Imperia could stop him. If anything, it seemed to spur him on, and it added to the air of invincibility around Pogačar during his Monuments mission of 2026.

Victory at Paris-Roubaix would see Pogačar become the first rider to win five Monuments consecutively, a feat equivalent to Tiger Woods’ annexation of all four Majors in 2000-2001. It would also leave him in a strong position to claim all five Monuments in a single season, Paul Seixas’ astonishing development notwithstanding.

Even though riders of Pogačar’s size – 66kg on the eve of the Ronde – have rarely thrived on the pavé of northern France, Paris-Roubaix still seems a more straightforward kind of a goal for him than the more subtle Sanremo ever did. 

At Sanremo, being the strongest rider is sometimes only a notional advantage in a race of such fine margins. At Roubaix, on the other hand, the sectors of pavé serve as a winnowing process, leaving only the very strongest in contention come the final hour of racing. At Sanremo, Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates-XRG had to concoct ways to bend the race to their will over the years. At Roubaix, the attritional nature of the parcours means they don’t need to be quite as inventive, they simply need to be attentive.

And Pogačar will have learned plenty from his debut a year ago, when he placed second in the Roubaix velodrome after taking the race to Van der Poel. He might well have beaten him at the first attempt had he not crashed with 38km to go. 

“Last year I gave it a shot for the first time, and I saw what I can do and that I can go for the victory as well in that race,” Pogačar said last week, pointing to the factor that makes him such a contender on this terrain.

“It’s just so demanding on the body, and you need to have big, big endurance. I will not say I fell in love with the race last year, but I really started to like it. And now, I just want to achieve one step higher in the future.”

It’s easy to take Pogačar’s all-terrains dominance as a given, but it’s worth remembering that lining up as a favourite for Paris-Roubaix is not something a defending Tour de France champion typically does. When Pogačar lined up twelve months ago, he was the first reigning Tour champion to do so since Greg LeMond back in 1991.

Indeed, it’s become a rarity for past Tour winners of any description to line up at Paris-Roubaix. Bradley Wiggins was the first to do so in the 21st century, and there was a sense of novelty about his tilts at the race in 2014 and 2015. By then, however, Wiggins was no longer in Team Sky’s Grand Tour rotation and his Paris-Roubaix endeavour felt like something akin to a retirement project, even if he performed respectably on each occasion.

Pogačar, by contrast, is the defending Tour champion and operating at the very peak of his powers. The most obvious comparison from generations past is with Bernard Hinault, who tackled Hell of the North five times and won it on the fourth attempt, beating Roubaix royalty Roger De Vlaeminck and Francesco Moser on the velodrome in 1981.

The last defending Tour champion to win Paris-Roubaix, meanwhile, was Eddy Merckx himself back in 1973, and he was only the third man in history to achieve that feat after Fausto Coppi in 1950 and Louison Bobet in 1956. It’s a very select group, but Pogačar will expect to join them.

Fabian Cancellara has been among those to point out that developments in bike technology, and more specifically in tyre width, have made the cobbled Classics more accessible to a wider range of riders. 

But even in that context, Pogačar remains an outlier. None of the men who will vie for the podium at the Tour in July will brush shoulders with him on the Trouée d’Arenberg on Sunday. And, as race director Thierry Gouvenou pointed out during ASO’s official route recon this week, any contest on the pavé is still notionally tilted in the favour of the three-time Roubaix winner and seven-time cyclocross world champion Van der Poel.

“For now, you could say that Mathieu van der Poel still has a slight edge over Pogačar on this terrain,” Gouvenou said. “Especially if the weather turns and the race becomes more about handling and experience on the cobbles.”

For now, the weather looks relatively benign, but Pogačar is unlikely to be cowed by the conditions in any case. A crash before the Cipressa couldn’t stop him at Milan-Sanremo, and the presence of Remco Evenepoel couldn’t knock him off his stride at the Tour of Flanders. He surely won’t be fazed by anything Paris-Roubaix throws at him the second time around.

Even so, Paris-Roubaix offers more variables than any other race left on Pogačar’s 2026 schedule. Technology has advanced over the decades, but this remains a race of broken bikes, broken men and broken dreams, as Giuseppe Saronni sniffily pointed out after watching his old rival Moser’s third win on television in 1980. “Roubaix should be removed from the calendar,” he said. “What’s the point of it? You go hard, you drop everyone, then you puncture, you break your bike in a pothole, and you lose it. What’s the point of it?”

But for Pogačar, a man who seemed almost bored by his most recent Tour de France win, that highwire element is surely an essential part of the appeal.