Pogacar and UAE are laughing, but the rest of the peloton should still take a long hard look in the mirror

Tadej Pogačar is back racing, and everyone in northern Italy certainly noticed. On paper, the Slovenian of UAE Emirates-XRG did not even appear to have the ideal opening stage to strike in the Tour of Switzerland, but that did not matter at all. When he accelerated accidentally with 70 kilometres to go, the entire peloton watched passively.

He had been absent from racing for more than a month, but on Wednesday Pogačar immediately showed that there should be no doubts about his form heading into the Tour de France. With a solo attack of more than 70 kilometres, he accounted for his rivals in the first stage, leaving the general classification already looking decided. But why on earth did the Slovenian attack so far out?

After collecting a few bonus seconds, Pogačar chose to keep going. With 71 kilometres to go to the finish in Sondrio, he was already alone. It looked like little more than a glorified training ride for the winner. “It was hard, very hard,” he said in the flash interview. “The start was calm, we had everything under control. But the first climb was already very difficult.”

The route was perfect for Pogačar, but he could easily have waited for the hard finale. So why did he not? “Nils Politt did a great job there, and we took bonus seconds there. Then Brandon [McNulty, ed.] and I looked at each other, and we said: Let’s go. From there I just went,” the Slovenian laughed.

Pogačar first gained a small gap, and for a moment it seemed as if he might wait. The world champion took bottles, had a relaxed sip, and casually put some ice in the back of his neck with his hands off the bars. It was the moment when the chasing group seemingly could have come back with ease.

After the finish, there was surprise at the more than four-minute lead over the first chasing group, apart from a few brave lone attackers. Pogačar was strong, but several riders admitted that everything had also completely stalled in the group behind. Others complained that Richard Carapaz and Andrea Bagioli rode away on their own instead of working together.

Pogačar himself knew nothing about the bickering behind him. “I had no radio, so I didn’t know what was happening behind me. I just kept riding hard, but once I knew the gap was big, I could find a rhythm and try to hold it to the finish. That was still very far away, and hard. But at the same time it was technical too, so it was nice to ride alone.”

The general feeling after stage one was that Pogačar had ridden impressively, but that nobody had really put a scratch in his path. As if the whole peloton had already thought at the first acceleration: leave it. The general classification is therefore already decided, with Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) second at 2:22. Bagioli (Lidl-Trek) is third, at 2:39.

“This was definitely not the plan. But somehow it worked. Thanks to my teammates, because without their blocking work at the back it would not have worked,” stressed Pogacar, who had three disruptors with him among the chasers in Jhonatan Narváez, Brandon McNulty and Felix Grossschartner. On Wednesday, Pogacar even went so far as to say that he would like to see his teammates win in the coming days as well.

The dominance is frightening. “I feel great, I did not expect this. I’m very happy with the result and the time gap,” Pogacar said in the mixed zone, including to In de Leiderstrui. “Beforehand you do not expect something like this, but when the team had already set such a high pace, I felt that I was good. I really had to go 100 per cent, but of course I had the advantage of being alone out front.”

He did add, very nicely, that he could also have cracked, but the question is how realistic that chance would have been. “This could have come back to hit me like a boomerang, but I would not have minded that either.” The search for the real pecking order in Switzerland could therefore turn into a failed mission.

The peloton has been warned — a peloton that should still take a look at itself. In the other four days in Switzerland, there are still scraps to be picked up, but no real fight against Pogacar was ever truly launched. And so the best rider in the world can remain, and become, even more convincingly the best rider in the world.