Tadej Pogacar chooses a film stage to assume his next ideas: to be the best in history, win those races that resist, transcend, compete against legends now that he runs out of adversaries on the planet of cycling. Run the Strade … Bianche, its white sand roads, columns of cypresses protecting the entrance to the haciendas, soft hills that surround Siena, the city of Italy where they want to stay forever.
Pogacar (26 years) has already raised the Strade Bianche twice (22 and 24), has crowned the cobbled slope of Santa Caterina and admitted to the goal of the race with its torture museum on the side of the terraces that decorate the inclination of the square.
After the success protocol in the Arab Emirates Tour That he is obliged to win every February for the commitments with his sponsor (UAE, the country itself), Siena is its launch ramp of a new course, the roller mode that overwhelms its rivals and simplifies the forecasts. Whenever competes, Pogacar is the favorite.
This was decreed in the 2024 season, the best in history for many analysts compared to the 1972 course by Eddy Merckx. The Slovenian sealed 25 victories in 57 days of competition, including the tour (plus six stages), the turn (six more) and the World Cup with an attack 100 kilometers from the goal in Zurich.
With only 26 years and in physical fullness, the Pogacar sequence complements any adjective for the devotees of the old ‘Mata Story’ School. Three Tour de France (and 17 stages), a turn of Italy, world champion 2024, 2 Liege-Bastoña-Lieja, 1 Flanders Tour, 4 Lombardy, 2 Strade Bianche, 2 Tyrrhenian-Adriatic …
And so, 91 triumphs in six seasons since the world was shown as an emerging star in the Tour of Spain 2019, when he conquered three stages with 19 years and his director, Biscay Josean Matxín, left that sentence for posterity. «Pogacar is not to stop …«.
Pogacar has not stopped since then, the last four seasons number one of the world classification, and always bending the bet, looking for motivations, pressing the step to despair of their rivals, which can only applaud and accompany the Titan.
Paris-Roubaix and return to Spain
In that search, the Slovenian phenomenon has two steps to confirm this campaign: its contest in the Paris-Roubaix in exciting duel with Van der Poel and in the Tour of Spain, where Vingegaard awaits him. Two races that you have not won. In winter a video browsing the cobblestones of the Arenberg forest, the hell of the north, the classic of the classics, and confessed on the RMC radio of Monaco, where he lives, that the idea “liked.”
Meanwhile it will try to capture the Milan-san row, The classic strenuous that is decided in the descent of the Poggio after passing through the Cipressa, and that has never achieved.
In the interviews they already propose impossible medium occurrences, such as winning all the monuments (San Remo, Flandes, Roubaix, Liege and Lombardy) the same year or treating the impossible in history, what no one did, the three large rounds of the calendar, tour, return and turn in the same course.
But in the meantime, Pogacar triumphs without scandals in his path, without the eternal Black doping shadow that flew over cycling. For this he also has an answer, as confessed in RMC: «I think we are paying the price of what they did in the past. If we took the example of performances 15 or 20 years ago that seemed incredible, we ido -rated to the runners who cheated. Now those fans who admired them have grown up, are 40, 50, 60 years old, and have that, the fact that their heroes were liars. That generation is still the one who looks at us and cannot trust us for what happened in the past. I think some more years will pass, some more generations, before suspicions disappear. This confidence that people lost a few years ago is impossible to recover immediately. And I can’t blame them ».
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