Try reading these out loud and see how they sound:
Wout van Aert, mere mortal
Tom Pidcock, mere mortal
Julian Alaphilippe, mere mortal
What’s wrong with these statements? All three are exceptional athletes, big winners in huge races. the best riders on their team — they’re captains, super stars, the future of the sport of pro cycling.
And yet they’re mere mortals compared to Tadej Pogačar, the second coming of the Cannibal. Already this season he’s won three stages and the overall of Paris-Nice, three stages and the overall of the Vuelta a Andalucía plus victories in the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold and Fleche Walloone. It’s April, the man is just warming up, stretching his legs. He’s amusing himself before gunning for his third Tour de France crown. Oh, and he’s only 24 — this is long-term trouble, another decade of dominance.
As Eddy Merckx has procliamed, Pogačar can “win everything.” Which means the Classics, the cobblestones, the Ardennes races, one week stage races and grand tours. Basically, every event he shows up for on a race bike. As he said this week, you never get tired crossing the line in first place.
And that makes everyone else, no matter how skilled, ambitious and well-trained, something less. If Pogačar seems inhuman, then that makes the rest of the stars human. If he is out of this world, then they are very much earth-bound. If he is a generational talent then everyone else in the peloton will wish they’d been born Before or After Pogačar.
Michael Kwiatkowski, mere mortal
Primoz Roglic, mere mortal
Adam Yates, mere mortal
It’s Tadej Pogačar’s world and we’re just racing in it for scraps. We’re hoping for a off-day, a lingering injury, a nasty cough. We’re looking at the cycling calendar with one objective: where can we avoid the Slovenian so we can reach the top step of the podium, somewhere, anywhere. Pogačar Avoidance is about to reach epidemic proportions.
Physical dominance has significant mental and emotional impacts on everyone else. It lowers confidence and self-belief, it impacts the motivation to train, it hammers morale. It gets under your skin and plays games with your head.
Mere mortals spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about Tadej, scheming some unexplored way to beat him, searching for weaknesses that don’t exist. It’s no fun being ordinary when extraordinary rides away from you. A sports psychologist can only do so much then one man is kicking your ass every week.
Tadej Pogačar has won the first two of the three Ardennes races with a climber-happy Leige-Bastogne-Leige coming up this weekend. All we can say to those mere mortals pinning on a race number is … well, good luck.
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