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Tadej Pogacar: "A child prodigy"
Photo: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD / AFP
It's a strange idea that Tadej Pogacar's career actually started with disappointment.
When his big brother Tilen started cycling in Ljubljana, Tadej wanted to do it.
Like younger brothers do.
But the cycling club couldn't find a bike as small as Tadej needed.
That's how he tells the story today.
The nine-year-old had to wait a whole winter until someone finally found a bike for him in spring and he could start his first race.
The lesson: As a young driver you have to keep calm and wait patiently for your chance.
That was also Pogacar's plan when he traveled to the Tour de France with the UAE team of the United Arab Emirates in August.
He was actually supposed to support his captain Fabio Aru, in retrospect that sounds like a bad joke.
"The goal is that he learns and sees how far he can go without compromise," said team manager José Antonio Fernández at the time "Biciciclismo".
Well, he can obviously go very far: In the mountains, Pogacar attacked the leader Primoz Roglic time and time again.
On Saturday, the Slovenian took the lead in the overall classification in a dramatic mountain time trial up to the Planche des Belles Filles, on Sunday the 21-year-old rolled to Paris in the yellow jersey.
Even Roglic hugged him on the way, the two posed for photos.
In the footsteps of Fignon
Pogacar is the first rider since Laurent Fignon 1983 to win the Tour on his debut.
And not only that. Pogacar was the first driver to win the Maillot Jaune, the young professional and the mountain classification on the same Tour of France.
And besides, Pogacar triumphed in three stages.
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Primoz Roglic (left) and Tadej Pogacar (right): "If you ask me in a week or a month, I still won't believe that I've won the Tour de France."
Photo:
Christophe Ena / AP
Tadej Pogacar is incredibly good.
Its discoverer Andrej Hauptmann has known this for a long time.
After the victory of his protégé in the Tour de l'Avenir, a kind of Tour de France for talents, he guided the son of a professor and a draftsman from Ljubljana to the UAE-Emirates team in 2019.
Pogacar won the Tour of California, and because alcohol is only allowed there from the age of 21, he was instead handed a cuddly bear on stage.
Somehow Pogacar always seemed precocious.
However, the new tour winner cannot really grasp his success.
"Even after finishing third at the Vuelta, I didn't think I could win a Grand Tour," said Pogacar on Saturday: "If you ask me in a week or a month, I still won't believe that I won the Tour de France. "
Faith is such a thing, especially in cycling.
In the past three weeks, the top talent's performance was viewed with suspicion.
On the eighth stage, Pogacar stormed the Col de Peyresourde to a historical record.
He was faster than the previous record holder Alexander Vinokurow, a former doper.
And in the mountain time trial on Saturday, Pogacar was a full 1:21 minutes faster than specialists like Tom Dumoulin.
How is that possible?
The suspicion comes along
The doping suspicion always rides in the peloton, and so Pogacar is under observation.
His discoverer Hauptmann, for example, was excluded from the 2000 Tour as an active professional because his hemocrit level was too high - an indication of epo-doping.
The head of the UAE team is the Swiss Mauro Gianetti, himself an active professional in the 1990s and from 2004 to 2011 manager of the Saunier Duval team, which was excluded from the tour in 2008 due to a doping incident.
And then there is the bloodletting operation and the trial against the alleged Erfurt doping doctor Mark Schmidt, who is also said to have taken care of customers in Slovenian cycling.
Even the world cycling association UCI announced that it would investigate against Slovenian cycling.
So far, however, there are no indications of a connection between Pogacar and the bloodletting operation or specific doping suspicions.
"I have a clean slate," said Pogacar last on ARD.
He and his supporters prefer to explain their success in terms of talent and training.
Miha Koncilija, Pogacar's youth coach, told Deutsche Welle that today's tour winner was "a child prodigy".
Although he was smaller and skinny than the others, he learned to assert himself.
Pogacar has improved from year to year, its development is only logical.
It would also be logical if Pogacar not only maintained the level of performance, but even increased it.
He will be 22 years old on Monday and still have many tours of France ahead of him.
Should the UAE team soon provide him with even stronger helpers, he will be one of the favorites in the years to come, and maybe even shape an era.
However, Egan Bernal has shown how heavy the burden of expectation can be.
After sensationally winning the Tour in 2019 at the age of 22, he had to retire before Paris this year.
Pogacar's sponsor Hauptmann said last year, according to "NZZ", that his protégé had great potential.
"But there were many talents in the past whose development suddenly stopped."
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