We see magical things, for example in cycling.
Two prodigious trajectories have come together in the same country and, suddenly, the rest of the world has become a spectator. The present belongs to the Slovenes, a country of two million inhabitants, cyclists whose school we had not heard of.
(Among other reasons, because Slovenia barely has 32 years of life: it comes from the Yugoslav dismemberment, effective in 1991).
To understand Tadej Pogacar (Paris-Nice champion) and Primoz Roglic (Tirreno-Adriatico winner), we cannot turn to history, not even to the talent search of the Slovenian school. Both appear by spontaneous generation, perhaps blessed by the magnificent and winding Slovenian roads.
Spontaneous generation, and we cannot see it any other way, no matter how many analysts vaguely resort to the Slovenian competitive mentality or its economic potential. Of the nations broken off from Yugoslavia, Slovenia is the healthiest in financial terms: it is the Switzerland of the Balkans, we are told.
“Sponsors do their part to help athletes. And if the bet fails, the good economic health of the country allows athletes to return to the family nucleus”, writes Igor Evgen Bergant, a Slovenian analyst.
Maybe…
The reality is that Pogacar and Roglic are pure talents.
Tadej Pogacar is only 24 years old, and that fact sets him apart: at that age, in another era, few cyclists had carved out a niche for themselves on the UCI Pro Tour.
Pogacar is 24 years old, and in this time he has won two Tours (2020 and 2021) and two Tirreno-Adriatico and has been third in a Vuelta and adds another seven classics: he is a cannibal who attacks when he goes up, when he goes down, when llanea and when he time trial.
And it doesn’t matter if we are in winter, spring or summer.
“He is the best cyclist I have ever seen”, a range of experts have declared to La Vanguardia, including cyclist David de la Cruz and Manolo Saiz, former sports director.
True to his cannibalistic spirit (wise men associate him with legends such as Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault), Pogacar won Paris-Nice this week, another notch in his record, and he has done so by adding three victories in one go, three of eight stages, including yesterday’s closing, with the top at Col d’Eze and the end in Nice, definitely at sea level.
Pogacar’s exhibition has made his rivals blush, and especially Jonas Vingegaard, the only cyclist who has dared to stand up to him in recent times, without going any further in last year’s Tour, a race that the Dane had signed up for.
Perhaps looking askance at his compatriot, Primoz Roglic (33), a jumper on the ski springboard in his teens, has emerged in the Tirreno-Adriatico, also with three victories and the overall.
He has done it like a phoenix, a cat with seven lives: Roglic is a kind of cyclist returned from beyond the grave, a guy who had broken everything in 2022, with two falls in the Tour and the Vuelta, and who had remained six months fallow, six months until its reinstatement this week, on Italian roads.
