Morale is low in some camps as the 'Pogačar effect' takes hold ahead of the 2026 Tour de France

Can Tadej Pogacar be beaten in the upcoming Tour de France? The defending champion won the Tour de Suisse in dominant fashion and seems very hard to beat in July. Dutch riders Koen Bouwman and Sam Oomen aren’t very optimistic, and they try to explain what it’s like to ride in the peloton with such a voracious competitor. Spoiler: It’s not much fun.

Oomen raced at the Tour of Switzerland, where he had hoped to achieve a good result. “I trained hard, trained in the heat, thinking I was in pretty good shape at the start of the race,” he explains on the Dutch language podcast, In het Peloton. “In the GP Gippingen, the prelude to the Tour de Suisse, I was right in the thick of the action. But in the Tour de Suisse, I stepped into a boxing ring and took a beating.”

And that’s mainly thanks to Pogacar. The Slovenian rider from UAE Team Emirates-XRG won three of the five stages and took the overall title with a 6.30-minute lead over the runner-up—the largest margin since the war. “There’s one team—and especially one rider—who stands so far above the rest that it’s hard to even wrap your head around just how fast he’s actually riding, even though you’re giving it your all yourself. I don’t know if ‘disillusionment’ is the right word, but that’s the first word that comes to mind.”

Right from day one, Pogacar showed he meant business. The world champion (who had been out of competition for a month) went on the offensive as early as the opening stage. With just over seventy kilometers to go, he accelerated and gained minutes on his first pursuers. The tone was set. “On day one, I heard it a lot—many riders were saying to each other, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’” said Oomen.

Bouwman tries to explain the difference between himself and Pogacar using a comparison. “Every regional club has a summer evening race. We have one here in Doetinchem, too, and there I race against amateurs who are landscapers—people who lay tiles and haul trees from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. By then, I’ve usually already been riding for three or four hours, but you can play around with that a bit. They ride incredibly fast, but if you want to, you can outride them.”

"I really think the difference between the amateurs and me is the same as the difference between Pogacar and me," Bouwman sighs. "And I didn't lay tiles from seven to five—I'm just a pro, too, and I give it my all. The difference is just so unbelievable. You can't even describe it."