Pogačar breaks his silence after fiancée Žigart's crash: 'She's a real fighter'

Tadej Pogačar endured a difficult day in Switzerland on Thursday. It had little to do with his own race, and everything to do with the crash of his partner, Urška Žigart. She went down hard in the final kilometre of the Tour de Suisse and lay worryingly still. Given the force of the impact, it turned out to be "only" a fractured jaw.

The hard part for Pogačar was the timing. Where his girlfriend crashed in Locarno, he had to climb on his own bike around an hour later. The Slovenian of UAE Team Emirates-XRG skipped all of his pre-race media duties to make contact with Žigart. She urged her fiancée to keep racing.

Afterwards, during his cool-down, Pogačar took a moment to speak to her, with an intrusive camera briefly pushed aside. Team manager Mauro Gianetti said he saw an understandably subdued rider, one who also skipped the media after the stage. Before the start on Friday, Pogacar was back in the mixed zone talking to CyclingProNet.

"Thankfully she's doing well. I went straight to see Urška in hospital after the stage yesterday. She had to stay overnight as a precaution, but thankfully she was discharged today," Pogačar explained. "She's doing well given the circumstances and is hugely positive. She's a real fighter and incredibly strong, which gives me extra motivation for the days ahead."

"She really wants me to take this leader's jersey home. I'm looking forward to seeing her again soon, on Monday," said Pogačar, who still rode a strong race on Thursday. "We had a plan beforehand to go for the stage win — either with Johnny or Brandon [Narváez and McNulty respectively – ed.], or with me."

"But that breakaway was incredibly strong. We kept the gap under control, but the extreme heat left the guys cramping badly along the way. On the penultimate climb we pulled back a good chunk of the deficit, but on the final climb we came up just short," Pogačar said.

"It would have been better if Johnny and I had crested the top alongside Mathias Vacek. With four of us, we'd have had a better chance of catching the escapees. But fair is fair: they worked together superbly and simply deserved the win. For the neutral fan, it was a great race to watch."

So what does Pogacar expect from Friday’s stage? “It’s going to be a tough stage right from the start. The last fifty kilometers are a bit flatter, but we just have to race with our eyes open and see how strong the breakaway group is. Yesterday, the breakaway riders made it to the finish, and I think the early breakaway has a good chance today as well.'

"The course is just a little too tough for the sprinter teams to control the race all day. We don't exactly have the initiative today. As a team, we need to stay together, do our best, and above all, try to finish safely," says the yellow jersey wearer.