Mathieu Warnier, Media365, published on Tuesday November 12, 2024 at 9:25 a.m.
While he has often been in the peloton alongside Tadej Pogacar this season, Romain Bardet confided that he sensed when the Slovenian wanted to win and ensures that he was able to evolve to become almost impossible to beat.
The 2024 season will remain that of Tadej Pogacar. Winner of almost every race in which he participated, Tadej Pogacar was ruthless with a UAE Team Emirates team dedicated to his cause. Present in the peloton of the Giro, the Tour de France but also during the Worlds, three races outrageously dominated by the Slovenian, Romain Bardet was able to closely witness the performances of the world number 1 and remains marked. During an interview given to Eurosport to close the season, the rider from the DSM Firmenich-PostNL team confided his astonishment at the progress of Tadej Pogacar over the last few months while adding that the latter “put end to end the immense potential that we saw in him “. “Apparently he didn't know how to train. Now he knows, he added in a playful tone. He puts together a potential that we have seen in recent years on his first two Tour de France which he won in the class. »
Bardet: “The feeling of not really being one of his adversaries”
If he concedes that this progression is “difficult to explain”, the native of Brioude assures that he does not “spend a lot of time looking for explanations”. “Even being contemporary and in the industry, we have the feeling of not really being one of his adversaries,” he added, a bit fatalistic. The year 2024 will have been notably animated by the fantastic rides of Tadej Pogacar, he who spent more than 80 kilometers alone in front during the Strade Bianche or who shook the peloton more than 100 kilometers from the finish during the Worlds. The question of whether, at certain times, he started an event with the certainty that the Slovenian was going to win, Romain Bardet's answer is very clear. ” Yes yes. There are several, just off the top of my head: the Strade Bianche, the Montreal Grand Prix and the world championships, he said. I was firmly convinced that without any mechanical incident or anything for him, it was taken care of. »
Bardet: “If we saw the UAE Team Emirates getting agitated…”
What the 2018 world vice-champion assures has never experienced in his career, he who will hang up his bike next spring, at the end of the Critérium du Dauphiné. If, in the past, Tadej Pogacar “still had a certain vulnerability that we found a little elsewhere, in the team for example”, the situation was very different in 2024, which saw the native of Komenda have a real armada at its disposal, both on Italian and French roads. “There, we knew, even on the Tour de France, that if we saw the UAE Team Emirates moving at the head of the peloton from the first kilometers to control the formation of the breakaway, that he was going to win the stage behind , confided the Slovenian runner-up during Liège-Bastogne-Liège. On the Giro, the same. It's happened at least ten times this season. » A trend which could be confirmed in 2025, but we will have to count on riders such as Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglic to try to stop the undivided domination of the “new cannibal”.
