Primoz Roglic: Winning the Tour de France won't change my life

Before the fateful 2019 Tour de France, Thibaut Pinot confessed that he wasn’t entirely sure if he really wanted to win the race at all. “If I win the Tour de France, I won’t have this life anymore,” he told L’Équipe. “Do I want to change my life? No.”

Primož Roglič has inherited Pinot’s mantle as the most star-crossed Tour challenger of his day, but he has a rather different view on the possible effects of winning the race. Then again, the Slovenian has always tended to greet victory and defeat alike a self-effacing shrug. The gallows humour deployed in his press conference after losing the Tour at La Planche des Belles Filles in 2020 wasn’t a million miles removed from the wry wit on show after his Giro d’Italia victory three years later.

“We all know which races I have won and which races I haven’t won,” Roglič said when he met the press in Lille on Thursday. “With the Tour de France, I have a bit of unfinished business but on the other hand winning it or not winning it… I’m 36 years old, so winning it won’t change my life. I’m happy or proud to still be able to come to the Tour to be a part of the biggest cycling event in the world. I’m just going day by day and enjoying it.”

No rider has ever enjoyed an entirely harmonious relationship with the Tour, and even its greatest champions have endured heartache amid the happiness. Even so, Roglič’s run of misfortune on the great race is striking. Perhaps only his 2017 debut, when he won a stage, ended with a sense of serene satisfaction. He has been best by a litany of setbacks ever since. 

In 2018, Roglič lost a podium spot in the final time trial. Two years later, he lost the whole race on the final weekend, and in hindsight, Roglič and his Jumbo-Visma team had probably thrown away several chances to win it over the preceding two weeks. His last three Tours – in 2021, 2022 and 2024 – have been ended prematurely by crashes. 

And yet Roglič endures. He responded to his 2020 trauma by winning the Vuelta a España, and he did the same after his crashes in 2021 and last year. It’s hard to shake off the sense that Roglič’s window of opportunity at the Tour slammed shut with those crashes in 2021 and 2022, but he’s back on the start line once again with ambition.

“Of course, being who I am, you always dream and fight and do the work to be the best,” Roglič said. “But everybody has to do it with the mindset to be the best, and then in the end the surroundings will tell you which place you get. But it’s not always just about the victories. From my personal career, I don’t remember a lot of victories if I’m honest.

“I’m just trying to look at it realistically. Winning it, not winning it – it is what it is. Me and my family and everyone around me, we will be the same way. A lot of times you show a lot more of yourself in not winning the race than in winning it. But, of course, to reach people outside, the media, what counts is always the number one.”

That’s not exactly true, of course, as Pinot’s immense popularity testified. And Roglič, too, is a man whose defeats have won him at least as many hearts as his victories. When he first entered the pro peloton, his apparently taciturn nature and calculating style of racing made him seem a remote figure. That public image was utterly transfigured, however, by the crushed dignity in his reaction to his defeat by Pogacar in 2020. 

“It’s the shit things that sharpen you, you know,” Roglič said on Thursday. “Without the bad things, actually, you don't know even what the good things are. It helps to learn.”

Roglič has absorbed more lessons than most over the years, most recently at the Giro d’Italia, where he was forced to abandon after a series of crashes as well as an infection. At this Tour, meanwhile, he lines up in a Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team where Florian Lipowitz – third at the Critérium du Dauphiné – will set out with GC aspirations of his own. Yet Roglič, as ever, seems to take it all in his stride.

“I was finished after the Giro – at the end I was on antibiotics because I had also some kind of bacteria,” Roglič said. “But all I could do was put the work in day after day. I was suffering, I was on my knees, and now here we will see. I have nothing to prove to no one – what that means, we will see at the end. I just want to come to Paris and make a toast there.”

Roglič downplayed the idea that he might mimic Simon Yates’ approach at the Giro and snatch the Tour from under the noses of the favourites at the last. “We are all starting from zero, we’ll all fight for every second, but I don’t expect Jonas or Remco will push me up the mountains,” he said. “The facts are there; the guys are strong. For me, I have to do my best.”

In the midst of it all, Roglič seemed to suggest this could be his final Tour appearance. He broke into a smile, however, when asked to clarify. “It’s just more in that kind of sense every day we live is also closer to the last one we have,” he said. “So every Tour that I do is closer to the last one that I do.”