As soon as he gets off the bike after training or a race, Tadej Pogacar presses the start button. send of the little screen fixed on your handlebar. Immediately, on the other side of the waves, hundreds of kilometers or tens of meters, wherever he is, Javier Sola receives a treasure of information, dozens of data to compute, analyze and conclude. It’s the life of the modern cyclist. It is the life of Sola (Alcalá de Guadaira, 37 years old), a scientist who is part of the notable tradition of physiologists, nutritionists, trainers and human performance specialists who from Spain have flooded the best cycling teams in the world in recent decades. He works in the UAE and since this season, and replacing another Spaniard, Íñigo San Millán, he is in charge of directing the point training of the best cyclist in the world, the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, overwhelming winner this year of the Strade Bianche, the He returns to Catalonia and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and a great favorite to win the Giro d’Italia, which begins on Saturday in Turin. Together with the masseuse Joseba Elgezabal, the nutritionist Gorka Prieto, the biomechanist David Herrero and the technical director Joxean Fernández Matxin, Sola is a fundamental part of the spanish bubble in which Pogacar breathes when he leaves his home in Monaco and immerses himself in high altitude concentrations and races with his team. “Pogacar’s numbers are unique,” he says in an interview conducted last December in La Nucia, at the team’s first concentration. “But I’m more struck by how quickly he gets in shape.”
Ask. How did you start training Pogacar?
Answer. There are five coaches in the team, and when Íñigo San Millán left for Athletic (October 2023) Matxin called me and gave me a list of the cyclists that corresponded to me in the new cast and Tadej was there, like one more.
Q. He got nervous? Did you fear responsibility? It is as if the owner of the company asks a diamond cutter to cut the most valuable diamond…
R. As a coach, if I don’t get in the way, I’m already doing well, then we’ll see. It is more responsibility, of course, but we are a good working group of coaches and then we also have Íñigo nearby for any questions or problems. Tadej has been with him for a long time and obviously knows him better than I do. We all work side by side. Although each coach has an assigned group, together we all do everything in the end. We all collaborate.
Q. The year of the Giro-Tour challenge begins with him, a complete change of habits… His first Giro, the first time he plans to run two three-week races in the same season…
R. The fact that the challenge was done this year is because it is one of the times when there is more separation between the Giro and the Tour. There are 33 days (from May 26, the last stage of the Giro, in Rome, to June 29, the first stage of the Tour, in Florence) and we think it is a good window for him to recover as soon as he finishes the Tour, and then we have four weeks to rebuild and do some tweaks. The Giro itself will be a workload. It arrives with only ten days of competition (Strade, San Remo, Volta, Liège). Thus, it will appear in the Tour with 31 days of competition and with 33 days in between. You will have time to assimilate. It will not be as forced a preparation as it would have been in other years. It will arrive with more or less the same days as other years, although, of course, it is not the same to do 31 individual days or one-week races over three months than to do them accumulated in three weeks. It has nothing to do with it.
Q. But the Giro is not as hard as other years, it has 10,000 meters less accumulated slope than last…
R. It doesn’t kill the route, it always kills the speed.
Q. The rivals (Geraint Thomas, Ben O’Connor, Daniel Martínez, Bardet, Tiberi, Uijtdebroeks…) do not seem to be particularly tough…
R. They will surely be tougher than the names say. All WorldTour teams have high-level people.
Q. What is Pogacar’s body like? What can you say about your physiology?
R. Wow, it’s touched by the wand. He is the best in the world for me. He is someone… supernatural. And I can say little more in that sense.
Q. Have you never seen anyone like him in stress tests?
R. That catches your attention when you see him, he’s exceptional, but I’m more struck by how quickly he gets in shape. The numbers, watts, VO2max, thresholds, lactate, are spectacular, yes, but you see that he has been training for four weeks and, damn, you say, this one improves faster than the others. And it also assimilates nutrition better. The great stars assimilate everything better than others. Genetics has a lot of weight.
Q. Will San Millán continue to collaborate?
R. He will be there for anything I want to ask him. We are colleagues, Tadej has been with him for a long time and obviously knows him better than I do. We all work side by side. Although each coach has an assigned group, together we all do everything in the end. We all collaborate.
Q. Pogacar says that changing coaches does not mean changing training at all… Do they follow the concepts of Zone 2, the Full Power Threshold, the use of lactate as a reference in training above watts and heart rate?
R. Of course, of course. We have a common line of work in the team, with some small nuances that each coach may have. And the results that he and the team in general have had with this line of work are there. As they say, when something is going well, it is better not to touch it.
Q. Do you use permanent lactate measuring patches in training?
R. That is a technology that is under development. It will come with time. During training it can help make a decision that cannot be done now until the blood is analyzed, sometimes too late. I do one more intensity interval, I remove it, as you find yourself. It can warn you of fatigue… In Sierra Nevada we see the Ingebrigtsen brothers, the Norwegian athletes, train, and after each interval they draw blood from their ear, spend I don’t know how much on test strips, and decide on the fly if do more or less as it comes out.
Q. Pogacar also says that he does not believe that he has any specialty – time trialist, climber, change of pace, uphill sprint – below the other, but that he can improve in all of them…
R. Yes of course. Given his youth, 25 years old, simply every time he gains experience and gets to know himself better, all of those are areas of improvement. He is also very strong mentally. All of that adds up. And every year he becomes a better runner.
Q. And, on top of that, in training, while the others seem to suffer, he goes up doing wheelsies, laughing…
R. He likes to have a good time. I think his greatest virtue is that he enjoys training, he enjoys competing.
Q. Will mental fatigue after the Giro not affect you, then, perhaps less controllable than physical fatigue?
R. Yes, it does affect, yes, that is why we have taken away days of competition this year and we have planned after the Giro for a long period of assimilation, especially physically and mentally, and for him to arrive fresh, in the best conditions.
Q. He assures that physically he feels prepared to even do the big three in the same year, 43 days, but not mentally…
R. Yes of course. It is having to always be with the stress that the race has, not to fail. I think that in the end it is what makes a little difference, right? Knowing how to handle that stress. It’s about making three big… oysters. Kuss did it last year, impressive.
Q. When he talks about Italy, Pogacar always talks about how he likes pasta and pizza, as if he were a glutton… Does he suffer a lot adapting to cycling nutrition, with a precision scale next to the food buffet?
R. Here at least you can see him eating well. He handles it well. He has a nutritionist, Gorka Prieto, who controls everything, and he is very rigorous. In any case, I think that you eat a pizza from time to time is psychologically good for them, as this sport is very hard.
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