Imagine for a brief moment that you get a newsflash in the coming weeks: Tadej Pogačar has retired from professional cycling aged 26. Ludicrous, right? But given the recent proliferation of such comments from the Tour de France champion, it’s not such an unthinkable prospect anymore. What started in the final week of the Tour, with references to not being immune to burnout and repeatedly forecasting his looming retirement even when unprompted, has grown into a genuine topic of discussion within the sport: are Pogačar’s days really that numbered?
The logical, rational answer to all this is that Pogačar is just tired, mentally and physically frazzled. After winning two Monuments in the spring, coming close in the other two, and then winning his fourth yellow jersey, the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider is worn out. While it’s true that he races less than the average rider in the World Tour (56 v 77 in the past four seasons), no one races with as much as pressure and expectation on his shoulders, and no one has to sit through an hour of media, anti-doping and podium commitments every time they step off their bike. Pogačar’s life is a well-earned prosperous and fortunate one, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be taxing. Referencing his €8.4m annual salary and suggesting he should just get on with it will only upgrade him to the speedy boarding line on a one-way ticket out to the Maldives. His current fatigue is entirely understandable and shouldn’t be dismissed.
His team know it, too. “Being Tadej Pogačar is nice, but it's not easy," UAE’s manager Mauro Gianetti acknowledged in recent comments to Cyclingnews. "He is under a lot of pressure when he races; everybody expects him to be strong, to win, to put on a show. So it's important for us to handle this, because he's not just a racer.” This past Tour especially pushed him harder than ever. “He's been through a very stressful Tour,” Gianetti continued. “A very demanding one, above all on a physical level, a lot of transfers and for him, being Tadej, it became difficult. He's a very straightforward person, and to be the centre of attention every day became tiring.”
It’s for this reason that Pogačar is skipping the forthcoming Vuelta a España, despite the Spanish Grand Tour being the only three-week race that he has yet to win. The Slovenian usually shirks away from comparisons to Eddy Merckx and from being called the greatest of all time, but he has, on occasions, let the mask slip. At the 2024 Volta a Catalunya, he declared his intention to win all seven of the big one-week stage races (he still hasn’t won the Tours of Suisse, Romandie and Basque Country) and added: “I have arrived at this point where I really strive to be the best ever.” He has also, of course, not yet triumphed at Milano-Sanremo, and Paris-Roubaix will surely be back in his sights next April.
All of that is to suggest, then, that Pogačar still has goals to chase, and still has reasons to get up every morning and train to be the best cyclist in the world. A Grand Tour, three stage races and two Monuments still need to be conquered to complete the set. Or do they?
For fans and historians, it would be nice if he could become the outright Tour de France record holder with six titles, but Tadej Pogačar doesn’t need to win another yellow jersey. He doesn’t need to win Roubaix to cement his legendary, all-round status. He doesn’t need to finally finish on the top step of Sanremo. He doesn’t need to win anything else. He’s already in the top-two greatest cyclists ever to have lived. What a power move it would be if he was to walk away from the sport at his peak. More likely – but still improbable – is that he skips the Tour in 2026, and instead focuses on his real passion: winning one-day races. Because speak to those who really know him, and they’ll say that in an ideal world he’d only race the one-day races. That’s what gets the boy racer inside him fired up.
We don’t know how this little subplot – which is, essentially, a private affair played out in public, a microcosm of events that led to it – bubbling away will eventuate: it’s most likely that he’ll return in September at the Canadian races and then defend his rainbow jersey in Rwanda. But his priority has to be on finding his mojo again and his enthusiasm for bike racing. And if that means he takes a racing sabbatical, then so be it. The human has to come before the athlete. It it doesn't, he will hit burnout, and that's not how a great champion should bow out.
