[ad_1]
At the age of 26, TadeJ Pogacar already has a Hall of Fame career. It seems that the slow want to win, and fall on when the site hangs up and – in general – everyone drops, even the most determined opposition.
It is not always clear sail: he was fooled by Mathieu van der Poel on Milan-San Remo, and he returned through the overwhelming raw power of the Dutchman’s engine every time he tried to distance him. But he took revenge during the Tour of Flanders, carried an elite group – including Van der Poel – through a series of attritical attacks, before hit the killer at the last climb of the 269 km race. The couple Heronveneer on Sunday for the last suspension in a fascinating trilogy of spring racing, while fighting for supremacy at the first three of the year’s monuments.
Even an eventually dominant victory in the Flemish Ardenes could have ended very differently, there would have been a more organized and dedicated chase. Pogacar is not invincible, but his aura of greatness was preceded. He is inevitably the favorite on every starting line.
That’s why she decided to chase Paris-Roubaix over the weekend, so fascinating. For the first time since the Tour de France in 2023, Pogacar arrives in Compiegne outside Paris as an underdog, an outsider for the title. At the tour, the UAE team Emirates Rider recovered from a broken wrist in a bad accident at Liege-Bastogne-Liege, the fourth monument on the calendar and another he is the favorite to win this season, which happened just nine weeks before. He still finished second.
This time there is no injury to the blame. For the first time in years, Pogacar is in its best form and is still not the favorite for a race. That he is not proof of the excellent form of Van der Poel, an extreme machine in the hardest one-day races and the out-and-out favorite to ensure a straight hat-trick of titles in the infamous Roubaix Velodrome.
The Dutchman’s combination of incredible power to force himself on the endless parts of the legs-tailed paved to the route, and his skills in dealing with cycling-who are honing through years of success as a cyclo cross-making him a fierce opponent. Pogacar, although not himself, is inferior in both senses.
He proved that he could cope with before and time on his competitors on the pavement on the fifth phase of the 2022 Tour de France, and three times on the dirt Dust roads of Tuscany at Strade Biananche. But Paris-Roubaix is a very different animal, with paved newspapers making about a fifth of the 259 km course, and requiring both tremendous strength and the total concentration.
It was a momentary slip in concentration on a rapid descent that Pogacar hit the deck at Strade Biananche last month and tumbled into the grass and lost the ground on Tom Pidcock. He still won, but he had the advantage of a steep climb to start his racing attack. Paris-Roubaix does not offer the same terrain: just flat, fast paved, with one slope at mons and pevels, where all his opponents are likely to mark every movement. Those larger and heavier opponents – Van der Poel, Wout van Aert, Mads Pedersen – have the lead on these parcours.
This is to say nothing about the threat of rain forecast for Sunday. Paris-Roubaix in dry conditions is dry and dusty; In the wet, the plots become a sliding-n-slide and the race becomes even more chaotic. Even Tadej Pogacar cannot control the weather.
Yet he still draws his rainbow streaks and races, and defies all the chance and conventional wisdom. In theory, Pogacar is not likely to fall into the ‘Hell of the North’ than anywhere else, but the cruel reputation of the race has been preceded. The Slovenia went for a high-risk strategy with a high reward. His overall offensive style and pure love for the game may not be suitable for a race that tends to reward patience and wait for the right moment. But Pogacar has shown no dislike for tearing up the rule book in the past; In reality, he seems to enjoy it.
That Strade Bianche accident is likely to have given the UAE team Emirates team chief Mauro Gianetti Nightmares, and the team hierarchy was eager to stop Pogacar from taking his Tour de France title defense and other goals for the season by tackling Paris-Roubaix. But the lure of the paved was clearly too strong for the world champion.
Perhaps the challenge of tackling a rare race is that he did not expect to win, the opportunity to push himself to greater heights, to go even further to sement his name as one of the big ones was also a draw. No defensive Tour de France champion has driven Paris-Roubaix since Greg Lemond in 1991. The American finished 55th, and it was also bad news for his Tour defense, as he finished seventh.
The last defense Yellow Jersey Winning Roubaix was a well -known name, Eddy Merckx, in 1973, and possibly the only rider standing in the way of Pogacar who was crowned the greatest of all time. Chances are stacked against him – but it tends to be when he’s on his most brilliant.
[ad_2]
Source link
