He’s going. And for the first few seconds after Tadej Pogacar launches the solo attack that will win him the world championship, nobody can quite believe it. He’s going. “Suicide move,” Remco Evenepoel mutters to Mathieu van der Poel alongside him. “I didn’t even know he’d gone, to be honest,” Britain’s Oscar Onley would later recall. “Everyone’s thinking it’s too much,” said Ireland’s Ben Healy. There are more than 100km remaining in Zurich and the rational consensus in the peloton is that the world’s greatest cyclist has just blown his chance at the rainbow jersey.
He’s gone. And for all the puzzled faces he leaves in his wake, the shock and disbelief that will materialise when he rolls over the finish line in first place several hours later, perhaps the first thing to say about Pogacar’s gamechanging move was that it wasn’t quite planned, but it wasn’t quite unplanned either. For one thing, he had been corralling his remaining Slovenian teammates on the front for some time. Afterwards, his UAE Team Emirates colleague Tim Wellens revealed that the pair were recently on a training ride in Monaco where Pogacar confided his intention to attack early. “I thought he was joking,” Wellens admitted.
Of course Pogacar has form in this regard. This year, ahead of Strade Bianche, he announced that he planned to attack on Monte Sante Marie – 81km from the finish – and he smiled as he said it, and so nobody really took him that seriously, because Pogacar very often says things he barely means, and in any case who attacks from 81km? Fast forward 24 hours and in teeming rain, Pogacar accelerates away on Monte Sante Marie, pulling out an unassailable gap and winning by almost three minutes. Was it spontaneous? Was it premeditated? Is there even a meaningful distinction between the two?
So first you have the tactical mind games, the theatre, the thespian flourish. But the moment itself: that comes from pure racing instinct. A little shift in the energy, the spidey sense that tells you your rivals are napping a little, and the breakaway group are beginning to cement their advantage, and now is the time, so go, just go. And the legs feel good, and the gap opens a little more easily than you were expecting, so you just keep going. Pogacar called his attack on Sunday “stupid”, but perhaps a better term for it is “mindless”: the state of flow that great athletes occasionally achieve in which their decisions are no longer entirely conscious or deliberate, where their body simply takes over.
So ends – with just Il Lombardia and a few other bits to come – one of the most remarkable seasons in the history of professional cycling. The great Eddy Merckx now believes Pogacar has surpassed him. Evenepoel puts it in even starker terms. “Tadej this year,” he said, “is not normal.” The Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, the rainbow jersey, Liège‑Bastogne‑Liège, Strade Bianche, 23 race wins in total. Beyond the bare statistics, that sense of sheer impregnability, the helplessness he engenders in his rivals, the conviction that he can win whenever he wants, however he wants.
There is of course a natural tendency to interpret the Pogacar supremacy in purely physical terms, to pore over the data, to fixate on wattages and outputs. And yet given the history of this sport, terms such as “not normal” and “from another world” – the headline on the homepage of L’Équipe on Sunday – are not neutral or weightless phrases. The story of cycling is a book that burns its believers on a serial scale, and so most dedicated followers exist in a kind of conditional incredulity: the more unbelievable it becomes, the more desperately we need to believe in it.
This is not quite the incredulity of fiction or art or pro wrestling, where the audience willingly submits to the artifice at the outset. Instead, the artifice is almost assembled piecemeal, part of a parallel process in which the viewer’s faith is simultaneously strengthened and tested. The more you watch, the more unreal the spectacle feels, and yet – by the same token – the more seductive it becomes.
And so in many ways this is not really about Pogacar himself, a rider who has never failed a doping test, who vigorously denies ever having taken a controlled substance, who has never really come under any credible suspicion of illegality beyond simply being really, really good. Doubtless there will be accusations and aspersions flung at him, as there have been all year, as they were at the last guy, and the next guy.
And rest assured, I’ve read the blogs. I’ve read the forum posts. I’ve stared at graphs and gone down Twitter rabbit holes and buried myself in haematocrit levels and watts per kilo up the Plateau de Beille and listened to a podcast in which Pogacar explains in frankly unwelcome levels of detail how many liquid carbs he can take on per racing hour before he has to shit himself. And fair play if this is what gets you off, if this is the level of commitment deemed necessary to be a Good Cycling Citizen.
But frankly, none of it has ever remotely interested me, and not out of an indifference to science or sporting morality but because to reduce Pogacar to a soup of numbers and chemicals is really the narrowest and most boring way of appreciating him; the most boring way of appreciating sport. Not to mention the fact that much of the cynicism relies on constructing a kind of alternative reality of his career, based on a bare minimum of hard facts and letting nudges and winks do the rest.
Perhaps the reality is that around every great athlete grow two fictions: an elegant and an inelegant version. And which we prefer, which version makes more sense to us, says something about how we process our world. Are we fated to be profane and fearful, to live in suspicion and mutual vigilance, wary of one another? Or is there still a beauty beyond corruption, a hope beyond futility, a wonder beyond cynicism, a clean break to win the world championship from 100km out? I don’t have the answers, and nor do you. But I know what fiction I’d rather live in.
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