Look at Eddie Dunbar, he was smashing the turbo and he came back straight away. “He’ll still have been smashing the turbo, which if you’ve got the head for it, it’s so good. Geraint Thomas, speaking to Telegraph Sport last week, said he did not think the layoff would slow the Slovenian down. Sure, Pogacar may have been off the bike for a while but it was only a week ago he was claiming in a different interview that the broken wrist he sustained in April came “at the perfect time” for him and that his preparation had been “really good”. Your standard grand tour winners do not do this.
It was only a few weeks ago he was tearing his rivals’ legs off in the spring classics, winning the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold Race and La Flèche Wallonne in quick succession, almost taking the mickey out of one-day specialists. The 24-year-old does not need to follow the ‘traditional’ pathway to the Tour. And UAE Team Emirates may well afford Yates protected rider status as a back-up.īut Pogacar is so ridiculously talented he defies conventional rules. He may not have raced much in the last few weeks (bar the Slovenian national championships, in which he took both road and time trial titles). Pogacar may not yet have full mobility in his scaphoid. The bookies certainly aren’t convinced, most of them installing the Slovenian as joint-favourite with Vingegaard, or just fractionally behind. Suddenly, here was Pogacar telling us he still has only “70 per cent mobility” in his scaphoid after his crash at Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and insisting “it doesn’t matter who is in front” out of himself and Yates, so long as one of them wins it.Ĭould it be that Pogacar has cracked before this Tour even begins?ĭon’t bet on it.
Between UAE Team Emirates and Vingegaard’s frighteningly powerful Jumbo-Visma team, which of course includes cycling’s Swiss Army knife, Wout van Aert, capable of cutting loose in any type of stage. Was it mind games? An admission of self-doubt? Whatever it was, Tadej Pogacar’s claim in his final pre-race press conference on Thursday that he was “not 100 per cent sure” of his form heading into Saturday’s first stage of the Tour de France in Bilbao, on account of the wrist injury he sustained in April, and that Britain’s Adam Yates would be his “co-leader” at UAE Team Emirates this year, threw a spicy pimiento into the peloton.įor months this Tour has been billed as a straight-up mano-a-mano slugfest between two-time champion Pogacar and his conqueror last year Jonas Vingegaard.
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