The Slovenian prodigy wanted to write his legend, he did it in capital letters and almost cramped at the end. Tadej Pogacar definitely can’t do things like everyone else, so he surprised everyone to embark on a stunning epic of almost a hundred kilometers and win his first world title. The Ticino protégé Mauro Gianetti the rest of the year, under the colors of Team UAE, succeeded and words fail to describe such an almost unthinkable feat. Well, except for him.
The attack of the three-time winner of the Tour de France, aged 26, caused the rest of the peloton to panic. Remco Evenepoel, Mathieu van der Poel and company were forced to very quickly burn out the cartridges planned for the end of the day and the Belgian and Dutch teammates popped one after the other like popcorn. So much so that the recent time trial world champion had to attack himself, without success, 70 km from the finish, before getting annoyed and giving up.
Aargau’s Silvan Dillier had placed the first stone of a Swiss tactic which almost brought home a medal (Stefan Küng and Mauro Schmied quickly disappeared), by taking flight with five other men, at the very start of the event . Then, Marc Hirschi tried everything in the last lap, but his sharp attacks did not pay off. He finished 6th in the sprint for bronze.
Five laps from the finish, or around 130 miles from the goal, it was the Spaniard Pablo Castrillo who placed the first banderilla. The Italians, Australians, Danes, British, Germans and French then made their distant attempts. Everyone tried to derail the trains of the big favorites with more than 120 km remaining. Except that there is no need to have several wagons or complicated tactics when you have the locomotive Tadej Pogacar in a platoon.
The hunt was organized almost immediately each time, particularly in the wake of the Slovenian teammates, who left nothing to chance. Jan Tratnik went to the front as a scout and his leader attacked… 101 km from the finish to join him a few minutes later. The big favorite attacking from so far away was unheard of and it took a few minutes for Belgium and the Netherlands to get on the board. Without a headset, cycling is done by instinct. And in this game too, Pogacar is the strongest, even if the Slovenian almost doubted his legs in the final.
The winner of the recent Tours of Italy and France had fifty seconds 90 km from the line when he joined the breakaway group. He always had “only” 40 to 80, 70, 60, then 50 miles from the goal, when he definitely left. Only the Frenchman Pavel Sivakov, his teammate at UAE, was able to follow him for a while and he offered him some welcome stints. The rest is history that was written before the eyes of hundreds of thousands of spectators around Zurich. The podium was completed by the Australian Ben O’Connor 34 seconds behind “Pogi” and the Dutchman Mathieu van der Poel a little further behind.
