Tadej Pogacar followed in the wake of the late Marco Pantani, sealing the first Giro d’Italia-Tour de France double of the 21st century in swaggering style, with victory in the final time trial of the 2024 Tour, in Nice.
Pogacar now joins an elite club of double winners, but none have achieved this feat in the modern era, or with such swagger. Over the two Grand Tours, totalling almost 7,000 kilometres, his accumulative lead has been well over 16 minutes, and he has spent 39 days as either Giro or Tour leader.
The last battle between the 2024 Tour’s top trio, Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, the outgoing champion, and debutant Remco Evenepoel, came on the corniche roads of the Cote d’Azur, but stuck to the script, with the Slovenian once again dominating the outcome.
In the time trial from Monaco to Nice, Pogacar beat Vingegaard by 1:03 and Evenepoel by 1:14 to win overall from the Dane, champion in 2022 and 2023, by 6:17.
Pantani’s Giro-Tour double came 25 years ago, in a chaotic and corrupt era, blighted by unrelenting doping scandals. But Pogacar’s comes in different times, in a highly-commercialised and technologically-driven sport, globalised by Netflix, dominated by nation state sponsors, that has also embraced success stories from new territories, such as Slovenia, Eritrea and Ecuador.
Pogacar is this era’s uber-champion, the freestyling boy-racer to whom the Netflix generation is increasingly drawn. Pantani’s Giro-Tour double came before he was even born. As his time trial performance on Sunday demonstrated, he is loved by fans because he never lets up.
Meanwhile, for some in the peloton, after 72 hours spent climbing mountains in the Southern Alps, the demanding 33.7-kilometre time trial was a bridge too far. Most were happy to go through the motions, with Pascal Ackermann letting slip that he had enjoyed his celebratory end-of-Tour pizza, before the stage, rather than after.
Unlike Ackermann, however, Pogacar was still hungry. The 25-year-old, even with the Tour already won, appeared as insatiable and invincible as ever and rode the time trial as if his life was at stake. Of course, he won, yet again.
The stats speak for themselves. En route to his Grand Tour double, he has won six stages in the Tour and six in the Giro, making him the first rider to win six stages in both races in the same season.
The shadow looming over this Tour has been that of Eddy Merckx, cycling’s greatest of all time, whose career record is now facing serious competition from Pogacar.
Merckx started seven Tours in his career and won five, while Pogacar, still only 25, has already won three out of five. Merckx spent 97 days in the maillot jaune while the Slovenian has already worn the Tour leader’s yellow jersey for 40.
The 79-year-old Merckx has already lost one prestigious gong, that of the record-breaking number of Tour stage wins, to Mark Cavendish, who sprinted to a 35th win in Saint-Vulbas on stage five. Asked after the Nice finish, if he had ridden his last Tour, Cavendish responded: “100 per cent.”
The 39-year-old from the Isle of Man crossed his last finish line, in Place Massena, having survived one of the toughest final weeks of Grand Tour racing in his career. Retirement is imminent, and while it’s unclear exactly what the future holds, he is expected to work in some capacity with his current sponsors, Astana Qazaqstan team.
Yet even Pogacar might accept that fate played a hand in the outcome of this year’s race. Vingegaard’s Visma Lease-a-bike team, winner of all three Grand Tours in 2023, has so far been a dramatically depleted force, blighted by injury and illness.
Worse was the horrendous high-speed crash at the Tour of the Basque Country in April, which forced three of Grand Tour racing’s Big Four – Vingegaard, Evenepoel and the ill-fated Primoz Roglic – off the road. Meanwhile, across Europe, the Slovenian was hitting his stride.
Pogacar was not racing with them in Spain, but had already set out his stall elsewhere, dominating the Strade Bianche classic in Italy and the Volta Catalunya in Spain. The writing was on the wall, and after he won May’s Giro by an eye-watering 9:56, the double was very much on.
This, however, is the Tour and inevitably, there are the usual doubts from ‘haters’ as Pogacar labelled them, freely expressed as soon as a performance is deemed extraordinary. Pogacar muddied the waters himself when asked about his team’s use of the noxious-sounding, but legal, ‘carbon monoxide rebreathing’. One day he didn’t know what it was, but by the next, he was an expert.
There were other stories to focus on. The three stage victories taken by Eritrean Biniam Girmay, the first black African rider to enjoy such success in the Tour, led to his win in the green jersey points classification, while victory in the King of the Mountains classification, by the pugilistic Richard Carapaz, was the first by an Ecuadorian.
Some in the host nation argue that the ‘Netflixisation’ of the Tour has fuelled a lack of authenticity. French traditionalists are still rooted in the ritual and heritage passed down from generation to generation. But those values are not compatible with the smartphone generation that is now flocking to the roadside, enthralled by the Slovenian boy-racer and his record-breaking rides. – Guardian
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024
