Just days after Tadej Pogačar was nominated for the world’s best sportsman crown in the Laureus World Sports Awards – the second successive year he’s been one of six nominees – he turned up at Strade Bianche, his first bike race of 2026, and immediately announced his candidacy for next year’s award. This season, said his legs, will be just like the last seven: dominated by the boy wonder from Slovenia. The only difference is that this time his hair is dyed bleach blonde.
People like to say that cycling is too complicated for newbies to understand, but that’s not the case; there’s been a very easy script to follow in cycling in the 2020s: if Pogačar is in the race, Pogačar will win the race. And at Strade Bianche, that script is even more specific: at 80km to go – eighty, eight-zero – on the 11.5km-long gravel sector of Monte Santa Marie, Pogačar will be rushed to the front by his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammates and then he’ll clip off the front and solo to victory.
Sometimes, riders like Tom Pidcock (2025) and Paul Seixas (2026) can initially stay with him. But eventually they’re dislodged and Pogačar has an open road ahead of him to create yet more history. This time he cruised to his fourth victory at Strade, taking him ahead of Fabian Cancellara as the rider with the most wins in this young but legendary race. It’s now the GOAT’s race, not Spartacus’s.
“It’s a great start to the season,” Pogačar said, rather understatedly. “It was beautiful to see all the guys in the team performing so well, and then the young bullets [Isaac Del Toro and Jan Christen], what a job from them. It was an honour to ride with such a team today and get the win.” He’s the one who takes the credits and picks up the plaudits, but he’s still humble and gracious enough to remember who set him up.
As impressive, mind-blowing, and monumental as all this is, though, there is another angle to discuss. Where once we were gripped and puzzled by the long-range attacks that required upwards of two hours of solo riding – such suicidal moves are not how races are won, we assumed for over a century of bike racing – now we’re desensitised to the downright ridiculousness of it all. An 80km solo pursuit? Bff, give me a finishing sprint between multiple riders in the Piazza del Campo, per favore. If the women can deliver that, why can't the men?
Fans in Siena touch the hand of bike racing's God. Image by Marco Bertorello/Getty Images.
The roadside fans are still animated. Some come decked out in UAE or rainbow jerseys, others come with cardboard signs announcing that it’s them, not the thousands of others, who love Pogi the most. Many, if not most, have their phones out, capturing history, recording a moment they can show their grandkids in decades from now. Look, I was there. I saw Pogačar. I saw one of his historic moves. Which one? There were dozens. Maybe still dozens more to come.
But what about the viewer at home, tuning in for some Saturday afternoon entertainment? When the default result in men’s bike racing has become a Pogačar win, do such masterclasses matter anymore? Is this it now – another Pogačar win – forever and ever until he retires? Does the viewer stay glued to their TV screens, watch and marvel, mouth agape, just like the first few exhibitions in 2021? Or are they so numb to greatness now that they turn the TV off, get the sweeping brush out and do the house work?
What about the commentators? What on earth do they do? After half-a-decade of reciting the same lines, they’ve exhausted all their superlatives, all their comparisons, all their words. What is there left to say? They can hype up the race for second and third – and, yes, the performance of Seixas and Del Toro, the predicted heirs to Pogačar, warrants being highlighted – but riders will tell you themselves that second is the first loser. No one remembers who was second. Even when it’s a rising star like Seixas. Because all that’s important is who won. And the answer is always the same: Tadej Pogačar.
The most pertinent question is what do the riders do? Long ago they accepted that they were second best, and only bad luck on Pogačar’s part could open a door for them, but what must gnaw at them is that the gulf only appears to be getting wider and wider. Another year is upon us, another year of domination, another year of everyone else being second best.
Win Milano-Sanremo and Paris-Roubaix in the forthcoming weeks, the only two Monuments that he still has to conquer, and add a fifth yellow jersey to his wardrobe at this summer’s Tour de France, and it’s just a matter of time until Eddy Merckx accepts that his title of Greatest of All Time has been passed over once and for all to Pogačar.
There is simply nothing anyone can do. Only Tadej Pogačar will decide when he stops writing history. For now, sit back, try to enjoy it, and try to remember that we’ve never, ever, ever seen anything like this before. In time, you’ll wish that, yep, you did delay the washing up or you didn’t go out for an afternoon ride of your own, and instead you stayed in and watched yet more mastery. If the Laureus World Sports Awards panel was watching Strade, they’ll come to correct conclusion that Pogačar is not just the greatest cyclist in the world, but the greatest sportsman in the world. Greatness has its limits, but Pogačar still doesn't know his.
Cover image by: Tim de Waele/Getty Images
