(Bergamo) A final demonstration for the road? The Tour of Lombardy, the final Monument of the season, offers Tadej Pogacar the opportunity on Saturday to complete one of the greatest seasons in the history of cycling.
On the banks of Lake Como, where the 118 will ende edition of the “dead leaves classic”, the Slovenian, three-time outgoing winner, can write a new chapter in his book “In pursuit of the greatest” by equaling Fausto Coppi, the “Campionissimo”, the only one to have won race four years of rank, at the end of the 1940s.
That he is the overwhelming favorite makes sense.
Because he feels that “the legs are still very good” at the start of the most mountainous of the five Monuments, while his rivals like Remco Evenepoel start to ride on the rim and that Primoz Roglic, Jonas Vingegaard, Mathieu van der Poel or Julian Alaphilippe are already on vacation.
But above all because it has changed dimension again in 2024 to reach a stratospheric level allowing it to sign one of the greatest seasons of all time.
A frightening assessment
He started the year by winning the Strade Bianche on a solo raid of 81 kilometers. Followed up with a victory at the Tour of Catalonia with four stages as a bonus. Won Liège-Bastogne-Liège, then achieved a Giro-Tour de France double, unseen since 1998, winning six stages each time along the way. Won the Montreal Grand Prix, the World Championships by attacking 100 km from the finish and finally the Tour of Emilia after another fantastic ride, his house specialty.
In the end, the results are simply frightening: he competed in ten events in 2024 and won eight of them, for 24 successes in total, counting the stages. The best total over a year since Italian sprinter Alessandro Petacchi in 2005.
He was beaten only by Jasper Philipsen at Milan-Sanremo (3e), Michael Matthews at the Quebec GP, where his seventh place is his worst result of the year, and… the rain on Tuesday at the Trois Vallées in Varés during a race stopped by bad weather.
We have to go back a long way, probably to the great vintages of Eddy Merckx in the 1970s, to find such a cannibalistic and complete season.
The Slovenian is already the first rider in the history of cycling to have won the Giro, the Tour, the Worlds and at least one Monument in the same year.
The great Eddy himself bowed after the Worlds by declaring that Pogacar was now “above”, even if he then qualified his remarks by specifying that they only related to the single rider of the Slovenian of 26 years in Zurich.
Weariness
The peloton, for its part, begins to admit its weariness in the face of solo demonstrations of the phenomenon.
“Everyone feels some fatigue. Serious ? Again ? », sighed the American Larry Warbasse this week in the podcast The Cycling Podcast.
“When he started winning, everyone said to themselves: we have to anticipate. But now he anticipates expectations. He won a race before anyone could try anything,” added the rider from the Decathlon-AG2R team who says he believes in the integrity of the Slovenian, sometimes called into question given his domination in a sport long plagued by doping. .
“Obviously there will always be people who look for darker explanations, especially in cycling. But I think he’s just the most talented of us. »
At the Tour of Lombardy, on a new route, but still very difficult, everyone is expecting a new recital from the Slovenian. The main – if not the only – question seems to relate to the precise location between Bergamo and Como where he will place his acceleration.
The Sormano pass (12.9 km at 6.4%) flashes red on all radars. We will then be a little less than fifty kilometers from the finish. A distance that has become commonplace for Pogacar 2024.