On Monday the waters of Lake Zurich were still agitated, still shaken, like the memory of the witnesses, by the beauty and excess of Tadej Pogacar’s latest masterpiece, the absolute, the brilliant madness that took him to the rainbow. The greatest admiring appreciation, open mouth without envy, only wonder, came from Eddy Merckx, absolute monarch of history, the reference by which only Pogacar is measured, the only one by which we can only measure him. “It is clear that Pogacar has already surpassed me,” the Cannibal acknowledged to Philippe Le Gars in L’Equipe. “I already started thinking about it seeing what he did in the Tour (six stage victories and a unique display of superiority over the best cyclists in the world), but, seeing what happened in Zurich, I no longer have the slightest doubt. I never managed to attack 100 kilometers from the finish line in a World Cup…”
And Merckx’s praise only condemns the Slovenian cherub, blond, almost beardless, with pimples and 26 years old, to become the reference for everyone. “History is now him, Pogacar,” proclaims Alexander Roos, the chronicler of the French newspaper, and only the numbers, always interpretable, since they respond to different eras, and only reflect the victories, not the style, the manner, the beauty, can make you think otherwise.
But the numbers are there and they generate sometimes depressing obsessions, like the one that grew within the young Tiger Woods, who had the list of 18 pinned to the wall of his bedroom. majors of Jack Nicklaus, the Eddy Merckx of golf (six Masters, five PGAs, four US Opens, three Opens, to top them off with his own victories, and, and everyone cheered him on and helped him with the accounting, Woods He finished at 15 (five Masters, four PGAs, three US Opens and three Opens). And that game also generates a shopping list dynamic in the fans in which Pogacar, the Tiger Woods of cycling, participates despite himself. “When I win something,” he told scientist Peter Attia a few days ago in his podcast on high performance, “I can’t be thinking about how much I need to equal Merckx because then I don’t enjoy it, and, furthermore, you never know what it will be. the last victory… But I want to win the five monuments, and I’m missing Paris-Roubaix and San Remo is the one that is going to send me to the grave, I have a feeling I’m probably going to die trying. a lot (in four participations in the Classicissima, which Merckx won seven times, he has placed third, fourth, fifth and 12th), but I am still very far away, it is incredible. But to be clear, it is a goal. And then we’ll see if there is room for Roubaix or not. And, of course, the Vuelta. It was my first grand tour, in 2019, at 20 years old, and I was third. The podium was a big step forward for me with three stages, the white jersey, and I want to come back and seal the deal with the red jersey, for sure.”
Pogacar did not return to the Vuelta because until 2024 he only ran one three-week race a year. In 2024 he raced and won the Giro and Tour, and, perhaps, if he had not put the World Championship ahead, he could have even tried to win the Vuelta as well, a subject that he leaves for 2025, after the Tour.
Merckx is the champion of 445 victories in a career that spanned 13 seasons, from 1965 to 1977, although 158 of those victories correspond to criteriums and village fairs. To achieve them, the Belgian, like the cyclists of the time, reached up to 151 days of competition a year (and not counting the winter months dedicated to the Six Day events in the velodrome). Throughout his career he wore a number for 1,617 days, an average of 124 days of competition per year and 22 victories, one for every six days.
Pogacar, representative of the era in which competition days have been reduced in exchange for group training and concentrations at altitude, has competed in his six years in the WorldTour 323 days of competition, to 54 per season, in which he has He has already achieved 86 victories (14 per year, but this year there are 23 and the Italian autumn trio still has to run: Tres Valles Varesinos, Emilia and Lombardía), one for every four days with a number.
Five Tours, five Giros, three World Championships, seven San Remo, hour record, five Lieges, two Flanders, three Roubaix, two Lombardies and one Vuelta, are the great victories of Merckx, to which Pogacar opposes, three Tours, one Giro, two Lièges, one Flanders and three Lombardies. Merckx is in all the subsets of the great champions in history, clubs of which Pogacar will surely end up being a member: with Alfredo Binda, Fausto Coppi and Bernard Hinault, the four five-time champions of a major club who have won at least one World Cup; with Rick van Steenbergen, Binda, Óscar Freire and Peter Sagan, with whom they have won three World Cups; with Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, Hinault, Alberto Contador and Vincenzo Nibali, with whom they have won the big three at least once, and with Coppi, Anquetil and Indurain, the group of great champions who have broken the hour record .
“Ah, the hour record,” Pogacar tells physiologist Attia of a challenge that Eddy Merckx faced in 1972 in the Olympic velodrome in Mexico City with a bike with traditional geometry and tires inflated with helium, “I will never again try it,” said the Belgian after leaving the world record at 49.431 kilometers. “I have suffered more than ever in my life.” “I thought a lot about trying it at the time,” adds Pogacar, “but two years ago Filippo Ganna arrived and left it at 56.792 kilometers, and I think it’s a lot for me. I think I lack consistency, I can’t be very consistent with the time trial bike.” And as he thinks, his team of physiologists, who believe that the hour record is a matter of many absolute watts (550 watts Indurain moved for 60 minutes, an absolute), a lot of size, some aerodynamics and a lot of technique in the velodrome. Subjects that the genius of Pogacar, his unique art, has not yet mastered.
