What do Pogacar's Tour de Suisse climbing stats tell us ahead of the Tour de France?

Tadej Pogacar won the Tour de Suisse by a margin rarely seen before. The Slovenian rider from UAE Team Emirates-XRG left his competitors in the dust, once again showcasing his climbing prowess in the grueling final stage. But what exactly did his performance on the way to Villars-sur-Ollon mean for the upcoming Tour de France?

Pogacar let Decathlon CMA CGM do all the hard work in the queen stage, after which he accelerated about nine kilometers from the finish and pulled away with ease. On that climb, he closed the gap by nearly two minutes on the challenging Lenny Martinez (Bahrain Victorious), and thus the world champion won his third stage and the overall classification in Switzerland.

Everyone could see that he was climbing the mountain hard. But without riders like Jonas Vingegaard, Paul Seixas, and Florian Lipowitz in the mix, there were few metrics that truly showed just how impressive the climb was. That’s why cycling fan ammattipyöräily dug into the numbers. He calculated Pogacar’s wattage over the final 8.61 kilometers, starting from his attack.

He completed that section of the climb (average gradient of 8.04 percent, 692 meters of elevation gain) in 22 minutes and 8 seconds. That works out to an average speed of 23.34 kilometers per hour and a VAM value of 1,876 meters per hour. For those who need to know: the VAM value is the number of meters of elevation you gain in an hour. For a climb lasting over twenty minutes, these are fantastic numbers.

With an estimated weight of 65 kg, Pogacar’s performance translates to a watts-per-kilo value of 6.95. During the first three kilometers of the climb, that figure was as high as 7.28 watts per kilogram, after which it dropped to 6.88 watts per kilogram for the next three kilometers, and 6.64 watts per kilogram for the final 2.5 kilometers. That’s still not at the level he demonstrated two years ago on the Plateau de Beille.

However, the Tour de Suisse is not yet the Tour de France. The fact that Pogacar is showing these numbers in June—just under a month before the real test—is impressive. The Slovenian is expected to gain those final few percentage points in the coming days. It remains to be seen what level of form he’ll display in the Tour, but the early signs are certainly enough to strike fear into his competitors.