But these are the exceptions. If a film’s main attraction are suspense and a surprise ending, like any good whodunit, I see no point in watching it more than once. If you know at the beginning who did it, it murders the film’s suspense, which has to keep us watching until the end. I think most people feel that way.
And that goes for any sporting event as well. Why watch a football or rugby match if you know who won? I might watch a rugby match replay just to see the scoring plays because I love rugby. But that’s all. And most replays are like that, concentrating on the scores and other highlights.
I watched Sunday’s Il Lombardia with the same attitude because I knew, just as everyone knew, that Tadej Pogačar would win it easily. And that’s exactly what happened. Yes, it was interesting to watch UAE Team Emirates chase down the breakaway and soften up Pogi’s rivals until he took off on his now inevitable winning solo breakaway. But if I hadn’t been tasked with writing about the race, I might have switched stations then – or at least followed the race with less than complete attention – because the race was over.
In fact, it could be said that the race was over before it even started, so great was the dominance of the Slovenian and his team this year. But is that good for the sport of cycling? The Dutch journalist and cyclist Thijs Zonneveld firmly believes it is not. “No matter how beautiful his solos are, no matter how special his season was: the superiority was too great,” he wrote in AD.
“Maybe, just maybe, he’ll wait until the last climb,” he continued. “Or for a final sprint with a handful of others, to make it a little suspenseful. But let’s be honest: the chance of that is about as likely as it raining chocolate sprinkles on Saturday. It’s more likely that Tadej Pogačar will go for it 50 kilometres from the finish. Or even 80. And if he feels like it, he’ll already be gone before the broadcast starts.”
He went on to praise Pogačar for his remarkable season, acknowledging that it was “one for the history books.” But he quickly changed tack. “Almost everything worked out for him. He didn’t get sick, didn’t crash, never had bad luck at crucial moments, and never missed a move. His baseline performance was so absurdly high that we couldn’t even tell if he was just in good form or top form. He never got tired. I did. Of him. And I think I’m not alone.”
Zonneveld is probably right (though I wonder if he would feel the same way if Pogačar were Dutch). I don’t doubt that most cycling fans – most sports fans in general – love to cheer for a winner. After all, that’s one of the great attractions of sports: it enables fans to stop feeling like losers because their marriages are failing or have already done so, their jobs are unsatisfying and don’t pay enough or any of a dozen other reasons for feeling dissatisfied with life. Backing a winner dispels that dissatisfaction, if only for a day or two or until the next match or the next race. Happily, fans of Pogačar were able to feel like winners all year long.
There are, of course, also true cycling fans who feel privileged to be able to watch a true genius of the sport in their lifetime. Instead of suspense, he has provided otherworldly brilliance, which is not a bad substitute. But I have the feeling that many cycling fans have become disgruntled by the inevitability of his wins. On the website SingletrackWorld, comments ranged from “Dull as ****” to “I turned off with 20 km to go.”
And there was this, from someone signing on as “crazy-legs”: “Commentators were saying it was 25 wins in 57 days of racing. Which is insane and impressive but sadly also rather dull. I turned [the Lombardia] on with 45 km to go and it wasn’t a race, it was a procession. The only even vaguely exciting bit was seeing the third group on the road fighting it out for 3rd place. World Track Championships next week from Denmark, thankfully Pogačar doesn’t race track!”
Sure, that’s a very small sample size but it seems to show that cycling may have a real problem. (And was the expected lack of suspense the reason the English-language Eurosport did not broadcast Il Lombardia live, showing minor races instead? If so, then cycling has a bigger problem than I thought.)
Pogačar is thinking about bringing his invincibility to all three Grand Tours, a feat that has never been done. “I thought about doing La Vuelta too,” he told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “But the Olympic Games were on and I did not participate because I had to recover. Giro d’Italia, Tour and Vuelta in the same year? I am not thinking about that now, but one year I might do it.”
He just might. That would certainly bring suspense back into the sport, especially if Jonas Vingegaard returns to his best form and Remco Evenepoel improves his climbing. I would certainly watch all three Grand Tours to see if he can pull off yet another historic feat. Three Grand Tours or not, if Vingegaard and Evenepoel were able to provide real opposition in the Grand Tours next year, it would be great for the sport. And if Evenepoel, Mathieu van der Poel and a fit-again Wout van Aert provided serious challenges to him in the one-day Classics, that would also spice up the year. And their respective teams also need to step up and provide opposition to UAE Team Emirates.
It would be a shame if Pogačar’s undeniable greatness became a handicap for the sport rather than its main attraction.
