When he goes out to talk to the two dozen journalists from around the world who have arrived overnight in the hotel courtyard, Tadej Pogacar is in as good a mood as when he trains on the quiet roads of Alacant doing wheelies non-stop to feed your reels on Instagram. It’s not even four in the afternoon and the warm winter sun, so fleetingly passing by him, hits him squarely on his beardless, child-like face, and he squints his eyes and mutters in front of the on-the-record recorders; “Uhhmm, I would be cool here with sunglasses, like I have a hangover.”
He dominates the stage and laughs, Pogacar in front of some journalists who, serious as garlic, feel that in that five-star hotel on the outskirts of Benidorm they are about to witness an important moment in the history of cycling: Pogacar, no less, is going to explain to humanity why he has decided to run the Giro and the Tour in 2024, which, implicitly, means that he is going to fulfill one of the fans’ great wishes, to see in his life with his eyes, not in the mouth of his grandfather or on an old YouTube, a cyclist winning the two oldest three-week races in the same year. Not even Pogacar had been born when Marco Pantani, the last of the double, closed it in the murky (Festina Case) July 98. “Uuhhhm, I’m 25 years old, I’m not so young anymore that I can’t try to run two three-week races the same year, but I’m too young to know Marco Pantani other than because of how much I’ve heard about him,” says Pogacar, definitely without sunglasses, definitely more serious. “I know that he is a myth for all of Italy, a cycling hero, but I was only four years old when he died.”
Not many cyclists have managed to win Giro and Tour in the same year and all those who have achieved it are myths —Fausto Coppi did it twice. Jacques Anquetil, one; Eddy Merckx, three; one Stephen Roche, and Bernard Hinault, two, the same as Miguel Indurain—but not many have tried it either. Since Pantani, only Alberto Contador, in 2015, and Chris Froome, in 2018, have tried it. Both won the Giro, the easiest part of the double, but Contador finished fifth in the Tour and Froome third.
“The most difficult thing about completing the Giro and Tour is the mental issue,” explained the boy from Pinto in June 2015, a week before launching into the Tour. “It is not easy to finish the Giro knowing that the next day you will not be able to take a break, eat everything, forget about the world for a few days.”
And Pogacar, before even starting 2024, the year of the challenge, already agrees. “I don’t want to think about the double, no, I just want to think now about winning the Giro, then we’ll see,” warns the Slovenian cyclist who, before turning 25, had participated in five three-week races—one Vuelta and four Tours—and In none of the five had he gotten off the podium: two victories in the Tour and two second places, and a third in his debut in the Vuelta. “Physically I feel prepared to even run the big three in the same year, like Sepp Kuss did this year, but I don’t know if I could mentally withstand being 100% concentrated for so many days in a row.”
—Don’t you think that Vingegaard, who has defeated you in the last two Tours, is thinking that he will have an even easier time this year?
—There are 33 days between one race and another. Plenty of time to recover physically.
The usual four weeks between Giro and Tour are almost five this 2024, courtesy of the Paris Olympic Games. And this element has been key when the UAE made the decision that the time had come for Pogacar to face the challenge. “That extra week will be very good for him to rest after the Giro before closing his preparation for the Tour at altitude,” explains Javier Sola, Sevillian from Alcalá de Guadaira and the Slovenian’s new coach after the previous one, the Basque Íñigo San. Millán, will sign for Athletic. “In fact, Tadej will arrive at the Tour with only 31 days of competition, because we have cleaned up the calendar a lot. He will debut in the Strade Bianche on March 2 and then, before the Giro, he will only race Milan-San Remo, Volta a Catalunya and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. 10 days preGiro only.” He gives up the Tour of Flanders, the Monument of the cobble walls in which he was crowned in 2023. “And it’s annoying, because in the Monuments it is the races in which I have the most fun,” says Pogacar. “But I have to think that after the Tour I want to run the events of the Olympic Games and the World Cup.” On the Tour he will be accompanied by the Spaniard Juan Ayuso, who brings his debut forward a year. He will do it at 21.
And when he announced it, the Spaniard was almost as happy as the boss of the UAE, and almost of the peloton, Pogacar, who like a pizza obsessive, the sometimes forbidden dream of cyclists, designed with laughter to finish his ideal pizza: with pineapple No, with kiwi and hot dogs and cinnamon and chocolate sauce… And it was crazy.
You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes inFacebook andxor sign up here to receiveour weekly newsletter.
.
.
_
