Pogačar on Tour de France form: significantly faster on a test climb, but doubts over pre-Tour altitude camp

In a week and a half, the Tour de France starts in Barcelona — with one outstanding favourite: Tadej Pogačar of UAE Team Emirates-XRG. The Slovenian won the Tour de Suisse last week, including three of the five stages there. Afterwards, at the closing press conference in Villars-sur-Ollon, he made a few more interesting remarks.

While his rival Jonas Vingegaard rode and won the Giro d'Italia in May, Pogačar looked for ways of his own to measure his level. For that he turned to one of his regular test climbs in the Sierra Nevada, where he camped with part of UAE Team Emirates-XRG's Tour squad in preparation for the race.

By his own account, Pogačar had set a very fast time on that climb last year. "I still remember thinking: wow, I don't think I'll ever be able to go faster. This year, at the end of the training camp, just for fun, I decided to give it another try. In the end, I was clearly faster than last year. So yes, I would say I am stronger than in 2025 — certainly from a training perspective," he told L'Équipe.

Anyone who saw the gap between Pogačar and the rest in the mountains at the Tour de Suisse could indeed conclude that he has grown even stronger. On the final day to Villars-sur-Ollon, he turned it into a test, too. "I just tried to keep that pace to the top. It was a brutal day today, and also super hot," he let slip after the stage.

"This is probably how it will look at the Tour, with this heat and so much elevation before the final climb. It was really good to test the legs, the heart and the lungs on the final climb. I went all out and it was really, really hard, but it was actually a nice climb," he said after the last stage in the Alps.

So what's left for Pogačar now? Normally he would head to Isola 2000 for an extra altitude block during the run-in to the Tour, but that is still uncertain — and it has everything to do with the heavy crash suffered by his partner Urška Žigart on stage 2 of the Tour de Suisse Women. Žigart rode over a speed bump in Locarno and then went down, breaking her jaw.

"I still need to decide. Now that Urška has to recover, our plans have been thrown into some disarray. The most important thing is that we can spend a bit of time together over the next few days," Pogačar told HLN. "The form is there, I think. I'll still do some specific training, but not much more is needed — there isn't time anyway, with so little left before the start of the Tour."

In his flash interview, Pogačar had already said he was looking forward to a reunion with his partner, who, fortunately, is now doing a little better. "I'm happy with the overall win, but also happy that I can now head home, to Urška. We'll reset a bit at home and do some specific training, and then we're off to Barcelona very soon," he concluded, with the Tour de France in mind.