To earn a nickname like Mr Paris-Roubaix, you need a few things. A supreme athletic talent, of course. But also a steely-eyed belligerence when it comes to defending your ground – and a decided lack of risk averseness.
And Seventies star Roger De Vlaeminck – Mr Paris-Roubaix himself – has once again been displaying plenty of the latter two attributes in his latest interview, this time with Belgium’s Het Laatse Nieuws.
De Vlaeminck called assertions that Pogačar is as good as Merckx “crazy”, adding: “Pogacar isn’t even close to Merckx’s toes! Journalists who dare make that comparison don’t know anything about it.”
He even suggested that the Slovenian would find it impossible to drop him, too: “Let me be 22 years old today and ride in the peloton with Pogačar, and he won’t break away from me. Where was it recently – when he rode away from [Remco] Evenepoel? In Lombardy. Not even on a difficult climb. As good as Merckx… Come on.”
This isn’t the first time that modern riders have come under fire from De Vlaeminck’s acerbic opinion. After last year’s World Championships road race he said: “With me, Merckx or [Freddy] Maertens, Pogačar would never have ridden alone in front for 90 kilometres.”
De Vlaeminck’s insistence that Pogačar would be utterly incapable of dropping him were he 22 again, doesn’t do anything to dispel this.
Retiring Canadian rider Mike Woods put forward a well-constructed argument in favour of Pogacar recently, telling Cycling Weekly: “Merckx was competing when there were only four billion people on the planet. And only four countries were good at it… and there were guys he was racing against who were still working.”
Woods added: “The fact that Pogačar’s as good as he is with this level of depth, with this pool of talent that’s being drawn from, it’s vastly superior, vastly superior.”
So let’s keep on enjoying these little debates while remembering that none of us are demonstrably ‘right’ – we’d just like to think we are.
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