In easily winning a sprint to the finish line atop Jebel Jais (19.0 km @ 5.6%), last year’s winner of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Road Race World Championship probably took an insurmountable lead over his rivals, though his margin in the GC standings is now only 18 seconds over second-place Joshua Tarling (INEOS Grenadiers) and 23 seconds over Movistar’s new climber, Pablo Castrillo. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone in the UAE Tour peloton can overtake Pogačar in the final four stages, the last of which is another summit finish.
Tarling won the stage 2 time trial, with Pogačar, who was favoured, finishing third, 18 seconds behind the winner and 5 seconds behind the back-in-form Stefan Bissiger (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale).That defeat was disappointing for on his day, the Slovenian is one of the best time trial riders in the world. But the same is true of the 21-year-old Tarling, who continued his team’s surprising early-season win streak. It was the fourth win of the year for INEOS Grenadiers who won only 14 races all last year.
Pogačar also did not have an ideal ride on Monday’s stage 1 for as he began his lead-out for UAE’s sprinter, Juan Sebastián Molano, Molano was not behind him because he had just crashed, severely enough to be scratched from the rest of the race. Commentators had, therefore, assumed that Pogačar was riding for the win. But it was a sprinter’s course, which was won by the in-form sprinter, Lidl-Trek’s Jonathan Milan. Milan started his sprint about 200 meters from the finish and maintained his speed all the way to the line to deny Soudal-QuickStep’s Jasper Philipsen. It was Milan’s third win of the year. For his part, Philipsen was again relegated for dangerous riding and is starting to cultivate a reputation for recklessness.
Is there too much love for Pogačar?
It was great to see Pogačar back on the road and racing again, though it feels as if he was never far away. The reason for that is that cycling journalists, having nothing else to write about over the winter, wrote mostly about… Pogačar. He does sell copies because he is one of the most popular athletes in the world in any sport and is swiftly becoming cycling’s Lionel Messi: not only the GOAT, or greatest of all time, but also the NOAT, nicest of all time.
With his openness, nonchalant attitude to racing that belies a ferocious ambition, his friendliness and his quick smile, he has been a boon to the sport, to his team and to his country. Who can forget him handing a water bottle he had just taken from a soigneur to a young boy running beside him in the Giro d’Italia? I thought it was one of the classiest gestures I’ve ever seen. He is deservedly a much-loved cyclist.
But is all that love good for Pogačar? Because love and adulation inspire expectations, and I think commentators and fans expect him to win every race he rides in this year. But he is not Superman. (There is no Superman, Dorothy.) Let’s remember why Pogačar had such a super 2024. One big reason, I think, was that he had a light spring Classics schedule. He rode in only four races before tackling the Giro d’Italia, and then no more races until the Tour and two races in Canada after that. So he was relatively fresh when he tackled the World Championships at the end of September.
This year, he has committed to ride in eight races in the spring, then the Critérium du Dauphiné as a warmup for the Tour. That’s a lot of intense racing. When he had a similar schedule in 2023, Pogačar crashed in the Liège-Bastogne-Liège and, as a result, was not 100% in the Tour, which he lost to Jonas Vingegaard (Visma–Lease a Bike). I believe that he crashed in the Liège because he was tired from all that one-day racing in a short span of time. I’m not suggesting that he will crash this year, but he may not live up to expectations.
The other reason Pogačar dominated last year was because of the competition. There was basically none, as Vingegaard suffered a heavy crash early in the year and, like Pogačar the previous year, was not at his best in the Tour. So the Slovenian never really had to extend himself to win the Giro and the Tour, which he won by 9:56 and 6:17, respectively. He will not have it so easy this year.
If it sounds as if I want Vingegaard to win the Tour, it’s sort of true. Of course, it’s wonderful to have a dominant superstar in the sport who dances every dance and wins most of them and, no matter what happens this year, Pogačar will always be regarded as the best rider of his generation, if not of all time. But I think it’s better to have two superstars to admire or even three – if Remco Evenepoel ever comes up to the Grand Tour-winning level. What’s better than three gods battling it out on a level playing field?
Peloton loses its way on Vingegaard debut
And speaking of Vingegaard, on Wednesday, he made his 2025 debut in the Volta ao Algarve em Bicicleta along with Primož Roglič (Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe), but neither of them were involved in the stage 1 finale, which ended in a farce. The stage was annulled after most of the peloton took the wrong turn, coming off a roundabout with 700 meters left to race and ended up riding at full tilt down a street that was on the spectator’s side of the barriers. Miraculously, no one was hurt, except the feelings of riders who, as Marco Haller (Tudor Pro Cycling) said on Eurosport, “suffered 190 km to put ourselves in the perfect position and then it is basically everything for nothing.”
Vingegaard’s teammate Wout van Aert, who was preparing to contest the final sprint but went the wrong way with most of the riders, told VTM TV, “I realised what had happened. I came out of that last corner, and I saw the barriers on the other side of the road. I knew we would sprint on that side, so I thought we’d been sent in the wrong direction. I thought there was a chicane somewhere, but at 400 meters from the finish, I saw lots of people making a sign to slow down.”
He was one of the riders who blamed the race organisers for the mix-up, saying, “They should have put in more barriers so there wouldn’t have been that kind of confusion.”
Let’s hope that this is not a sign of things to come this year.
