If you want to win a bike race, you’ll need a few things. Good legs, most importantly, but among the rest, good luck also ranks high up the list. Some riders seem to have no end of it, and until a week ago you would probably have counted Tadej Pogačar among them. The UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider was not exactly immune to crashing (remember his broken wrist at Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2023?), but his Grand Tours have generally been untroubled by major upsets.
James Shrubsall
Having worked at Cycling Weekly for over two decades, been a cyclist for considerably longer than that, James has followed the sport for more years than he can remember
That run ended last month on stage eight of the Vuelta a España when Pogačar crashed heavily, taken out by a stone while drinking from a bidon on an otherwise innocuous piece of road. The toll was heavy: broken collarbone, concussion, multiple abrasions and a cervical fracture – all of which saw him leave the race, and, at the weekend, announce that his season was over.
“Of course, this isn’t the way I wanted my season to finish,” said Pogačar in the team announcement. “Right now, the most important thing is to recover properly and give my body the time it needs. It has been a season with many special moments and I’m proud of what we achieved together. Now I’ll focus on getting healthy, supporting the guys from home, and coming back next year ready for what’s ahead.”
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It’s an announcement that puts to bed any thoughts of the Slovenian expediting his recovery to line up at the UCI Road World Championships in Montreal, Canada later this month.
Let’s be clear – a great champion having to miss a race through injury never increases its value, it only detracts. There isn’t a rider on the Worlds start list (or currently riding the Vuelta), who would wish a bad crash upon Pogačar in order to help their own chances of winning. When Movistar‘s Enric Mas took over the lead of the Spanish tour after Pogačar’s exit, he did so very reluctantly. He would of course have preferred to have earned it fair and square.
But bike racing is messy at times, and crashing is part of it. Pogačar’s absence has, without a doubt, opened up the Vuelta, and it’s opened up the Worlds. There is now a sizeable list of riders feeling as though their chance of securing gold in the men’s road race on September 27 has bettered – even if it’s not a situation they would have chosen beforehand.
It’s a classic Worlds course. Long (273km long) and attritional, featuring 12 laps of a hilly 13.4km city-centre loop, and a final tally of 3,803m of vertical ascent. Brutal – and just the sort of parcours that Tour of Flanders, Il Lombardia, Strade Bianche and Liège-Bastogne-Liège winner Pogačar would have revelled in.
But without the big favourite there, we have a phalanx of hopefuls for whom the dream just became a bit more real.
At the top of the tree is surely 2023 champion Mathieu van der Poel (Netherlands) who, on a course like this, could have been considered right behind Pogačar on the favourites list. There’s also Remco Evenepoel (Belgium), second in the Tour de France this year and another former winner. Then there are wunderkinds Paul Seixas (France) and Isaac Del Toro (Mexico) – the latter of whom will be contending for his nation’s first ever win in the race. Double Vuelta stage winner Wout van Aert (Belgium) will also be lining up next to his compatriot Evenepoel, while new mountain bike cross-country world champion Tom Pidcock will be hoping to add a second concurrent title to his palmarès.
Who will win? Who knows. At least not now. Van der Poel and Evenepoel might readily carry the ‘favourites’ tag with Pogačar out of the picture, but a distance of 270-plus kilometres, plus all that climbing, tends to lead to an all-bets-off kind of scenario. It may even be none of the above, and that is perhaps what is exciting about this year’s Worlds – there’s no clear favourite.
As arguably the best rider in the history of bike racing, Pogačar will undoubtedly have his day again next season, and we wish him the best with that. For now though, as he sits this one out, a level of unpredictability has been injected into the race that wasn’t there before. Let’s enjoy it.
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