Tour of Lombardy | Pogačar concludes ‘perfect’ season with big victory

(Como) Insolent with ease, Tadej Pogačar won his fourth consecutive Tour of Lombardy on Saturday in Como, equaling Fausto Coppi’s record, after a new solo rider who concludes a monumental season.

The Slovenian attacked 48.5 kilometers from the finish to win his 25th solo^e victory in 2024, his second in a Monument this year after Liège-Bastogne-Liège, with more than three minutes ahead of the Belgian Remco Evenepoel.

Only one rider, Italian sprinter Alessandro Pettacci, had won as many races in a season as of 21^e century, in 2005.

“Every victory is special, the team worked so hard, we had a lot of pressure. We followed the planned plan, I’m very happy,” reacted Pogačar, admitting to having “started thinking about vacations” in the last kilometers.

As expected – and feared by the entire peloton – the world champion, molded into white bib shorts and very acclaimed at the start in Bergamo, placed his attack in the difficult Sormano pass after a last big stint from his French teammate at UAE , Pavel Sivakov.

He accelerated just as the group of favorites caught up with the last survivors of the morning breakaway, made up of around twenty riders.

Barely started, the show was already over. Arrivederci and curtain.

In a scene seen and seen again in recent months, no one even tried to follow the Slovenian, who quickly gained a significant advantage, reaching the top with more than a minute ahead of his first pursuers.

A raid worthy of Merckx

Pogačar further increased his lead in the last forty kilometers to win the seventh Monument of his career, with 3:16 ahead of Evenepoel, whose first podium in Lombardy, and 4:31 over the Italian Guilio Ciccone .

Pavel Sivakov, despite the hard work put in by his leader, kept enough juice to take a good sixth place while David Gaudu finished ninth and second Frenchman.

With this new triumph in the “dead leaves classic”, which allows him to match the performance accomplished by Fausto Coppi between 1946 and 1949, Pogačar concludes in majesty one of the greatest seasons in history.

Winner of the Tour de France, the Giro, the World Championships, the Strade Bianche, the Tour of Catalonia, the Tour of Emilia, the Grand Prix de Montréal and two Monuments, the 26-year-old Slovenian won 9 of the 11 events which he started in 2024, adding 16 stage victories.

Aged 26, he is the only rider to have won the Tour, the Giro, the Worlds and at least one Monument in the same year, an appellation bringing together the five greatest classics on the calendar (Milan-Sanremo, Tour of Flanders, Paris- Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Lombardy).

This surprise attack is only comparable to those carried out in his best years by Eddy Merckx.

Resigned competition

The Slovenian built most of his successes thanks to long, devastating solo raids, completing the last 81 kilometers of the Strade Bianche alone or attacking 100 kilometers from the finish at the Worlds in Zurich.

Its supremacy inevitably arouses suspicion in a sport long plagued by doping. Assures him that these practices belong to another time and believes that current cycling is “a victim of its past” as he repeated on Friday.

His domination also causes, like the lone riders of Max Verstappen last year in Formula 1, a certain boredom and weariness within the peloton.

At the start on Saturday in Bergamo, under a beautiful autumn sun, the competition appeared resigned and fatalistic, like Matteo Jorgenson, winner of Paris-Nice in March, who confided that “no”, he did not think “he could win » in Como against the “best runner in the world, by far”.

These are “99% of the teams [qui] think that Pogačar will win, so do we,” added David Gaudu, recounting how he was overtaken on Thursday during the reconnaissance of the course by the UAE and Pogačar team in the Sormano pass to already foreshadow what was going to happen two days later late.

In reality, everyone knew where, when and how it was going to happen and no one was able to derail the anticipated scenario of Pogačar’s implacable superiority.