Tadej Pogačar was already in the midst of his finest season ever when things suddenly took a giant step up – literally and figuratively.
The literal was his ascent of Plateau de Beille, where he destroyed a 26-year-old climbing record. And the figurative was the speculation around what had produced a ride that was immediately dubbed by commentators as the single greatest climbing performance in the sport’s history.
That the man whose record Pogačar took – Marco Pantani – was both the last male rider to win both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same season and a rider whose performances in that 1998 season were widely known to have benefitted from the wonders of modern pharmacology only added to the scrutiny around Pogačar.
What are we to make of this achievement, and Pogačar’s historically dominant Tour in general? In the days since stage 15, explanations have arisen to tell us why, and how, a rider was able to climb at what is thought to be at or beyond the limit of human effort. But those explanations, by turns benign and nefarious, leave us with more questions than answers.
And while some would like us to simply move past it all, to enjoy the performance and stop wondering what produced it, that’s simply not workable. In a sport still haunted by decades of illicit performance enhancement, skepticism is natural. Less darkly, in a sport where the sports science arms race increasingly divides winners from also-rans, it’s natural to see a clear edge for Pogačar and his team and be curious what innovations (aside from budget) led to it. But in the search for answers, I’d offer one piece of advice: beware simple narratives.
Competing narratives
Humans are creatures of narrative. As a species, we use stories to comprehend and explain events, in particular extraordinary ones that test or tear open the boundaries of what we previously thought possible. There are two dueling explanations around Pogačar’s feats this Tour de France.
The first we’ll call the Mouthology.
Last March, a mysterious person began posting on Cyclingnews’ forums. Under the pseudonym Mou, the poster made prolific and detailed claims about Pogačar’s training and plans for the 2024 season before being permanently banned in mid-April for verbally abusing other forum users. The most relevant of those posts are screenshotted in this Twitter thread.
Mou claimed to be close with someone in Pogačar’s inner circle and outlined specific changes Pogačar had made in his training: working with a Monaco physiotherapist on strength and flexibility exercises to preserve power in his TT position; shortening his crankarms; and most notably changing last November from longtime coach Iñigo San Millán to Javier Sola, who joined the UAE Team Emirates staff in January 2023.
The posts were aggressively – often abusively – anti-San Millán, who Mou derided as a fraud. Mou also alleged there were factions within the team that undermined Pogačar. But what could be brushed off as the bravado of a Pogi-stan was belied by specific training data – including at least one TrainingPeaks chart – that sometimes accompanied the posts. Most notably, some of the predictions bore out. In one, Mou laid out Pogačar’s tactical approach to the opening week of the Giro, and said that by the first rest day, his lead would be three minutes. When May rolled around, Pogačar was comfortably in pink by 2:41 at that point in the race.
