As a journalist working in the current era of professional men’s cycling, it has become a bit of a risk to only travel to the final week of a Grand Tour. That’s because, thanks to a certain world champion who goes by the name of Tadej Pogačar, the race can sometimes already be decided by this point and there aren’t many stories left to tell. You can only write about one rider winning so many times.
Take the Giro d’Italia last year as a case in point. By the first rest day the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider had a lead of over two minutes and 40 seconds and two stage wins already to his name. He took the pink jersey on the second day of the race, and wore it for the next 20, winning on almost every single key alpine stage – days which organisers would have put in the race in the hope of creating a gripping general classification battle. The Tour de France was only marginally more interesting: Pogačar took the maillot jaune on stage four and held it to the very last day in Nice (taking six stage wins too). There were a couple of spirited battles from Jonas Vingegaard to upset his Slovenian rider’s dominance, but Pogačar, in the end, finished the Tour with a winning margin of almost seven minutes in front of the Visma-Lease a Bike rider.
Pogačar wins his fifth stage in the 2024 Giro d'Italia (Image: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
There’s certainly an argument that living through the Pogačar-era of professional cycling means we are witnessing history being made. The way that the world champion can ride away from entire teams trying to stop him, the way he can excel on all and every terrain, the way he looks unflappable under pressure, are all signifiers of his generational talent. This sort of bike rider doesn’t come around often – we haven’t seen someone do what Pogačar can do since Eddy Merckx, the 11-time Grand Tour and five-time Monument winner and the most successful rider in the history of competitive cycling.
So we can talk about the epoch-making attacks and the momentous record-breaking times up mountains, and we can appreciate what we are watching. But are we really enjoying seeing Pogačar do that, time and time again, in the moment? Is this really what we want bike racing to become? A sport which can be so unpredictable and engaging, having a winner decided before the battles can even commence?
If we wanted a taste of what Grand Tour races could be like when Pogačar doesn’t take to the start line, the 2025 edition of the Giro d’Italia gave us that. The eventual winner of the race (Visma-Lease a Bike’s Simon Yates) was not decided until the penultimate stage on the iconic Colle delle Finestre. Yates had to attack and attack in order to drop his general classification rivals on the mythical climb and, in the days leading up to his winning move, the battle for the overall victory had swung back and forth in the favour of the likes of Isaac del Toro, Richard Carapaz and Yates himself. It had been unpredictable, explosive and gripping. After stage 20’s Finestre showdown, there were almost too many storylines to cover. The Giro was pure entertainment, which, fundamentally, is the reason that professional sport exists – to give us something we want to watch.
Simon Yates, Isaac Del Toro and Richard Carapaz during the penultimate stage of the 2025 Giro d'Italia (Image: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
Sitting in the press room in Sestriere, waiting for the riders to come in for interviews after the racing had concluded on the final day, I had never witnessed a room of global media so engaged and excited by what was unfolding on the screens in front of them. There were shouts, there were gasps, and there was furious typing – I can only imagine that similar scenes were unfolding where millions of cycling fans were watching at home. It felt, for the first time in a while, like it should feel when you sit down for an afternoon of spectating the sport you love.
It’s true, though, that there will always be a sense of ‘what if’ about this Giro. A niggling feeling that although we got some of the most thrilling action we’ve seen all season, it wasn’t going down between the best of the best in the sport. With this in mind, can the Giro really be considered better than the Grand Tours in 2024, considering the likes of Pogačar and Vingegaard – likely the best GC men of this generation – weren’t racing? Or does this not matter?
The ideal scenario, this writer believes, would be to have the same kind of action we have seen at the Giro in 2025 at the Tour de France in a month’s time, but with Pogačar and Vingegaard there too. Of course, this is but a pipe dream – it’s clear that there are almost no bike riders on the planet at the moment who can challenge the UAE Team Emirates rider when he is in his Grand Tour-winning form. Based on last season, it seems that Visma-Lease a Bike and Vingegaard are our only hope of avoiding a predictable Tour de France where Pogačar leaves the rest of the peloton in his wake. Vingegaard’s form is relatively unknown, but we’ll get an idea of how he shapes up against Pogačar at the Critérium du Dauphiné in just a few days' time. If he can match the world champion, we may have a true battle on our hands.
The Giro has given us a taste of how good Grand Tour racing can be if there are multiple riders that can win – here’s hoping for a similar scenario at the Grand Boucle. Sport must entertain.
