'We don't know his real limit' - UAE coaches believe Pogacar can still improve

Tadej Pogačar’s coaching team maintains that the world champion still has margin for improvement as he heads into the 2026 campaign. The 27-year-old was dominant on all terrains last season, winning 20 races, including a fourth Tour de France and a fifth successive Il Lombardia.

Speaking to reporters at the UAE Team Emirates-XRG media day in Benidorm earlier this month, Pogačar’s coach Javier Sola expressed belief that the rider would continue to improve his performances in 2026.

“The question of how much we can improve is something that we cannot really know, but he’s at an age where he is maturing every year a little bit, and he also has more experience, and he can assimilate the training better,” Sola said. “I think he can still improve, for sure. We will see what the level will be, but he’s a very hard worker, and he takes care of all the details, so we don’t know what the real limit is.”

Pogačar made a striking leap forward in performance in 2024 after Sola replaced Iñigo San Millán as his coach, and the season saw him win the triple crown of Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championships. 

UAE Head of Performance Jeroen Swart acknowledged that Pogačar’s remarkable improvement that season had come as a surprise, and he suggested that any further advances would be more incremental.

“I think he still has indications that he could improve a little bit,” Swart said. “I think the margin for improvement gets smaller and smaller each year, but we also thought that before. Two years ago, we had no idea how much he could improve, and he has improved dramatically, but I think the changes now will be much smaller. It’s more about being able to sustain that level.”

Sola indicated that there would be no wholesale change to Pogačar’s training programme for the 2026 season, which will see him focus exclusively on one-day racing until the Tour de Romandie in late April. Pogačar will begin his campaign at Strade Bianche and then ride Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

“We do little details, little changes, but nothing crazy,” Sola said. “Because when something is working, it’s better not to touch.”

Sola and Swart were speaking in a press conference to showcase UAE’s coaching and performance team, though there were few trade secrets revealed in the encounter. Swart insisted that there was little especially innovative, about the approach of a team that won 97 races in 2025, and he also had a playful dig at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s recent stunt with a glider.

“I don’t think we do anything extraordinary, all of what we do is already in the literature, the science has been published,” he said. “But I think what we do really well is that we do the basics exceptionally well, and I think most of your performance is in that.

“I mean, we look at other teams launching airplanes and chasing all kinds of things… We do the basics really, really well, and there are some extras, but we don’t do anything crazy. And I think that’s really the secret sauce, doing things well.”

Isaac del Toro will make his Tour de France debut alongside Pogačar in 2026, and Swart indicated that the Mexican could aspire to bigger things in the years ahead. “In Isaac we see somebody who also could reach potentially that level,” said Swart, who added that Pogačar’s remarkable powers of recovery are what separate him from the rest.

“This is a unique attribute of his, his ability to recover. We already discovered that in 2019 when we did metabolomic testing on him,” Swart said. “You see it in the Tour. He often posts his best performances in the third week, which is not what you expect. Normally, we expect a decline in performance, but sometimes, he actually improves. And his ability to recover from stress, whether it’s training or racing, and adapt, is unsurpassed at this point in time. I mean, it’s incredible, his recovery rate. That’s why he’s so good.”

As simple and as complicated as that.