There were 50 kilometres of the race remaining when it happened. A rare mistake from the sport’s superstar, the world champion who never puts a pedal stroke wrong, the bike racer who has long seemed superhuman, showing that he is, in fact, mortal. Like the rest of us, even Tadej Pogačar can make mistakes. A high-speed, swooping left hand corner and the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider carrying too much speed were the ingredients for the disaster.
The result was two somersaults directly into thorn bushes lining the side of Tuscany’s white roads. Pogačar, to his credit, crashed in the right way – of course he did – keeping his arms aloft to avoid broken bones, and stumbled out of the shrubbery, his white skinsuit shaded with red where he had begun to bleed. He was up, back on his bike and chasing a flying Tom Pidcock quickly, the rips in his rainbows flapping in the wind, new cuts exposed to the dust and grime that Strade Bianche throws up.
“I know Pidcock can descend well and then Pog when he's on a mission, he was just descending and I was just like bloody hell,” Connor Swift of Ineos Grenadiers said after the race. The British rider was in the group with Pidcock and Pogačar when the crash happened, sitting in third wheel and narrowly avoiding coming down himself with some last-minute braking.
“Obviously he crashed so it just goes to show how much on the limit those guys are when they're attacking this race. You don't appreciate that until you're in the position where you're on the wheel and you're following them and and then you can really see what they are actually doing. Then you can understand why they pull out such an advantage because the group behind, they're not taking those risks on those corners. Every second counts.”
Image: James Startt
Team Q36.5’s Pidcock, who was directly behind Pogačar when he made the error, stressed that the speed in which the trio was moving meant that decisions had to be made quickly once the world champion had come down. The British rider kept on riding at the front of the race initially, before sitting up and waiting for Pogačar to come back to his wheel once he’d realised the UAE Team Emirates rider was back on his bike.
“Everything went through my mind. We were going pretty fast, so I'm glad it's all right, but at the same time I thought, ok, right, well now I need to keep going,” Pidcock said after eventually finishing second in the race. “I looked behind and also Connor was not there. I was like, well, it's now 50 kilometres to go and I'm on my own a-minute-and-a-half in front. But then he was back on his bike so I waited, it's the right thing to do.”
Pogačar's ability to get up from the crash, close the gap to Pidcock, eventually drop the Q36.5 rider and go on to take victory is a testament to his ability as an athlete. Despite the wounds and the pain, he kept focused and made his race-winning move on the final gravel climb of the day, before being greeted by dense crowds in Siena, who cheered for their battered hero as he crossed the line. It’s also a sign of his character that he was able to admit and take responsibility for his error of judgement at the moment of the crash.
“It was a moment of panic in my head. I was thinking about everything when I crashed. I stood up, picked up the bike, checked if my bike was okay, if my watch was okay, I was thinking are my bed sheets going to be okay the next day,” the world champion laughed ruefully in the press conference after his win.
“The next thing was to try and get to the front and finish it as we had put a lot of work into this race. When I came back to Pidcock I said sorry to him because I felt bad to everyone in the front group, it was my fault. He asked me if I was okay and we continued.”
Pogačar even suggested that having the British rider on his wheel – the current cross-country mountain bike Olympic champion – was putting him under pressure in technical sections of the race: “Maybe when you have a mountain bike world champion, Olympic champion, cross-champion on your wheel then I’m under pressure to show him that I’m good, but I showed him that I’m pretty shit,” the Slovenian rider smiled.
In the end, the outcome of Strade Bianche was as expected, but the hurdles which Pogačar had to overcome to take his third victory in Siena were not. Even on the days where he gets things a little bit wrong, however, the 26-year-old has the skills, class and strength to make corrections. This is what makes him so good.
For Pogačar himself, there was one key takeaway from the whole ordeal: “I guess I will never go to mountain biking,” he said with a shake of the head.
