Pogačar follows Ineos on the descent of the Cormet de Roselend on stage 9 .
yellow jersey . Trust me , it was a comedy of manners on my part , going back and forth with his press officer , trying to get him for just 30 seconds before stage 7 , shouting “ Tadej !” naively in the first few days in the mixed zone as though he would stop . Maybe he could answer my questions by email , was a WhatsApp message I got . I replied that the point was to observe him and be in his presence , not to actually ask him my questions . After that there was silence . After that , I sent back , defeated , “ Email is fine .” There were never emails . Besides , what could one even ask a man like that , a man who seemed at once so simple and boyish and yet could destroy and make miserable his enemies with such apparent ease ? What could one ask that hadn ’ t been asked before ? What could one ask other than “ How ?” Which is a question he , like the rest of us , could not possibly answer .
NORMAL PEOPLE
Tadej Pogačar was born to simple if uninspiring circumstances . His parents are emblematic of the first generation of the post-Yugoslavian middle class . His mother ’ s a French teacher , and his father works as a foreman in a factory that makes chairs . As a boy , he cried when his older brother Tilen was invited to ride for the Rog Ljubljana club – a club Pogačar would stay with until he went pro in 2019 – because he was not yet big enough to race bikes . When he finally got one , it was nothing special , a green aluminum Italian make , but to him , it was everything . Pogačar confessed in the post-Tour press conference that he had crashed on his first ride because he didn ’ t know how to unclip from his pedals . This humanised him . In fact , much of Pogačar is oddly normal . He ’ s not petit or compact or half-emaciated like most of his competition . For a bike
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PROFESSIONAL VICTORIES FOR TADEJ POGAČAR
racer , he ’ s rather stocky , and in normal clothes , one wouldn ’ t be able to tell that he was a bike racer at all . On the climbs , he can be rather ungraceful , bobbing around , pedalling , in the famous words of Tom Dumoulin , “ like a coal miner ”. And yet , despite this apparent inefficiency , he is exceptional . In a sport governed by arms races of technological advancement , marginal gains and strategic brinkmanship , Tadej Pogačar simply rides his bike better than anyone else .
He has fun , too . This is actually one of the most endearing things about him , that he very viscerally loves riding his bike . That love is obvious to anyone who has the privilege to observe him . On the hellish slope of Luz Ardiden , I stood by the side of the road and watched him zip by impossibly fast round the penultimate hairpin , riding to another resounding win . Brown-blond
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