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The same astonishing anecdote has been being told more and more frequently in recent days at the Tour de France, given the occasion: Andrej Hauptmann, a former Slovenian professional cyclist and current coach, attended a youth race at home ten years ago. What was this skinny eleven-year-old doing? He asked passersby, he was hopelessly chasing him! Oh, where, he told himself, this Tadej Pogacar had only wandered off the field at first. Now you are about to flip the suspended one.
The Tour de France is the largest and hardest cycling race in the world, nowhere are the climbs and chasms as massive as the mountains, where cyclists have been climbing after glory for 117 years. This year’s edition, which only started at the end of August due to the crown, was considered the toughest in a long time, with only 57,000 meters of altitude spread over 3,480 kilometers.
On Saturday’s penultimate stage there was a nasty individual time trial with a six-kilometer ramp in the Vosges, not for beginners, but then everything turned out differently there: Tadej Pogacar, the now 21-year-old Slovenian, snatched his compatriot Primoz Roglic, from 29, the general victory that was already believed certain, on his first tour. “When I was a kid, my dream was always to be here,” said Pogacar: “Now I’m the winner.” In the final stage on Sunday, the leader traditionally was no longer attacked.
As trite as it may sound, Pogacar has always been ahead of his time. He once said that he always emulated his two-year-old brother, and did it the way younger siblings do: fueled by the ambition to surpass the older one. After Hauptmann discovered, encouraged and challenged him, Pogacar soon won the most prestigious young talent awards. When he was successful on the Tour of California in 2019, he was still too young at the age of 20 to be able to taste champagne on the podium. He could understand the amazement, Pogacar said politely at the time, but he had been on his knees in his sport for ten years. A life under the sign of the wheel. Extravagant hobbies? Starry airs? Nothing.
Pogacar is no longer alone: in the past, the next generation only faced advanced methods in professional teams, although this also and above all focused on chemical mentoring. If you ask today’s coaches and drivers, they say in unison that professionalization, of course, completely legal, has long ago reached the youth segment. The small computers on the bike record huge data sets from each training session, these are analyzed by specialists; Nutritionists and material handlers are omnipresent.
In the past, many rough diamonds came from youth that were only cut later, today many newcomers are already round brilliant riders. And they act cheeky, often a little cheeky, some veterans think. Pogacar, as he demonstrated on this tour, has retained his childish aggressiveness. Only one winner, Henri Cornet, 19, was younger than him. That was in 1904.
Is this youth drive sustainable? And above all: credible? Pogacar has never been tested, but his mentors don’t have the best reputation, to say the least. Andrej Hauptmann was once suspended because his vital signs suggested blood doping; Mauro Gianetti and Matxin Fernandez, the drivers of Pogacar’s cycling team, raced on teams that often led to doping cases. On this tour, too, the new generation broke many records for provably doping contaminated times, while many doping nets are still particularly full of holes. Can this amazing tour be explained just by the above specialization? Only Tadej Pogacar himself knows.
