Tadej Pogačar has almost completed cycling. He’s won four Tours de France, two World Championships, 10 Monuments, and much more in between.
But as he marches on towards securing the title as the greatest cyclist of all time, he insists that he is not as fixated as some presume about triumphing in the remaining races that he still hasn’t conquered. Including, of course, Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix, the only two Monuments he still has to win.
“If I win these races,” he corrected a journalist at UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s media day in Benidorm who asked “when” the Slovenian would win San Remo and Roubaix. “But if I never win them, I will think that, more or less, there was not much more I could do [in cycling].
“But there’s always something else, anyway. There is a list of one week races I haven’t been to yet, the Vuelta [a España]… there are so many things left to try to win. But the years are going so fast that maybe there’s not much time to try to win everything that is left.
“There is quite a big calendar in cycling – big races, smaller races, and that’s super nice, but I don’t rush myself to win any of these. I like to go back to some races, I try to win the ones I haven’t won yet but I am not obsessed about it like some people might think.”
Asked again about Roubaix and San Remo – Pogačar has previously quipped that the latter race “is going to send me to my grave – he insisted: “Like I said before, I’m not obsessed with any of those.”
But, the 27-year-old admitted, Roubaix is the one race he’s most desperate to tick off. “I think if I could choose one [race to win between one extra Tour title or Roubaix] it’d be Roubaix. I’ve already won four [Tours], so if I win four of five… there is a bigger difference between zero and one than four and five.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Pogačar’s 2026 schedule is set to be a mirror of 2025’s – at least in terms of his main goals: he will start at Strade Bianche before moving to northern Europe to ride the four spring Monuments, and then he’ll go back to the Tour before concentrating on defending his rainbow bands at the World Championships.
The only other change is that he will do the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Suisse, two of the four remaining ‘Big-7’ one-week stage races he’s not yet won. Racing the Classics, and skipping the supposed bigger stage races like Paris-Nice and Critérium du Dauphiné, is not the typical schedule of a Tour de France contender. But Pogačar is not a typical bike rider.
“Everybody likes their own way to prepare for the biggest goals of the season,” he said. “I saw in myself that I can handle the Classics and the Tour as well.
“Obviously it’s maybe harder to race a Monument or a super big Classic every week, and then switch to mountains and prepare for the Tour. Sometimes I would prefer to do a few one-week stage races in the first part of the season and go to altitude, but that’s not me.
“I completely understand everyone else needs to win different races. I totally respect Remco’s [Evenepoel] decision not to do the Classics, because it’s not easy to do.”
There is an admission from Pogačar that the Classics are inherently risky. “There is always a chance that you have bad luck and crash out of Roubaix and break bones and then can’t start the Tour,” he acknowledged.
“But that can also happen in training and then you compromise the Tour. We are comprising the Tour every day, and it’s not something you can do anything about. It’s the way it is.”
Regardless, the Classics are when Pogačar gets to race how he truly loves to race. “The Classics are one day: you go there, everything is concentrated on that one day, and it’s not like the pressure of the Tour, where every day you are focused on the big goal.
“The Tour is way more stressful, and it’s impossible to have the same amount of fun when you go deep every day on the bike and you get tired. You work at the Tour for 21 stages and after you’re happy with what you’ve done.”
Especially in the past two seasons, Pogačar has made elite level cycling look easy, a simple matter of turning up and strolling to a victory. But he is adamant that it is anything but.
“From my point of view, the racing battles are quite tight, even if it seems they are not. It is always tough, always close, even if you see four or five minute differences. It’s always tight until the end.
“And in my opinion there will be more guys coming and improving every year, young guys coming through. Now we had Lipo [Florian Lipowitz, third at the 2025 Tour] and Oscar Onley [fourth at the Tour] and so many other guys in the past who’ve come to the Tour and had some bad luck.
“There is always going to be competition and you have to fight for the win. There is not one race where I think there is too much of a gap. Maybe when you check the results you think it was too easy for one guy, or another guy isn’t on the level, but it’s not true.”
