Cycling superstar from land where they prefer you keep your head down

Tadej Pogacar likes rap music, playing FIFA and Manchester City; unlike anyone else, he has been ranked the world’s best cyclist for more than 90 weeks in a row.

UAE Team Emirates' Slovenian rider Tadej Pogacar cycles during the official teams presentation in Bilbao ahead of the Tour de France. Picture: AFP.

Like many young men, Tadej Pogacar likes rap music, playing FIFA and Manchester City; unlike anyone else, he has been ranked the world’s best cyclist for more than 90 weeks in a row.

Scientifically, he clears lactate rapidly, exhausting himself and recovering better than his rivals. Personally, he is a quiet, humble 24-year-old who loves cycling, but never takes defeat to heart and never trumpets his brilliance. That is the Slovenian way – and Pogacar was created in the image of his land and its people.

It quickly becomes clear on arrival in Ljubljana that this is not Sachin Tendulkar and Mumbai and Pogacar’s face is not on every billboard. This is a young man who is good at riding a bike in a country of two million people, their national temper being modesty and restraint, where you flick through the TV channels and usually hear an accordion.

In the villages of Slovenia, the wedding ritual of sranga, “the obstacle”, lives on. Only after tests of manliness with an axe and a scythe, and a negotiated ransom with the villagers, can the groom transport his bride from her home. This is a nation that enjoys the struggle in affairs of the heart, be it love or cardiovascular.

Pogacar and his fiancee, Urska Zigart, Slovenia’s cycling power couple, live in Monaco now, though there is a plan to return home in retirement. It does wonders for the millions of take-home pay, but it also makes sranga less likely. As “the obstacle” shows, cultural hangovers linger over centuries. Slovenia’s approach to individuals, to success, is coloured by its history as a nation that was only recently granted independence, where they love the struggle of a suffering hero.

The main gripe against Pogacar is that he has had it all too easy, and that he is not Primoz Roglic. Even Mrs Pogacar suggests she would rather Roglic had won the Tour de France before her son started having his way with the famous race.

At times Pogacar has seemed near-invincible, but rare setbacks – losing to Jonas Vingegaard at last year’s Tour de France, breaking his wrist in April at Liege-Bastogne-Liege – have shown us that Pogacar can suffer like the rest of us. (He joked to Marjeta, his mother, that he still needs a collarbone injury to be a proper cyclist.) And it will help him domestically.

When Pogacar crashed at La Doyenne two months ago, it was no longer inevitable that he would be on the Tour start line in Bilbao on Saturday as the favourite to win a third yellow jersey. He was enjoying a season of seasons, demonstrating his mastery at the Amstel Gold Race, Paris-Nice, La Fleche Wallonne and Tour of Flanders.

After immediate surgery, Pogacar’s recovery began with running. Then, he would ride uphill and be driven down, to limit vibrations through his hand. After altitude training in the Sierra Nevada and Sestriere, and Tour reconnaissance, he has returned to racing and last week became national time-trial and road-race champion. Pogacar said the injury had come at the “perfect time” to permit him rest, a typically phlegmatic approach, as time spent with his parents reveals.

Klanec pri Komenda lies 20km north of Ljubljana. Two-lane roads cut through fields of green, untrampled by livestock, ending only when mountains jut out of the earth – a vista smooth to drink in but painful to traverse. A cyclist is never far from these roads.

The Pogacars have lived here for more than 25 years, in a yellow house in which they watched their son take the yellow jersey, with a stream out back around a modest garden. Marjeta Pogacar calls it paradise. Mirko, Pogacar’s father, sits quietly by. Their demeanour is friendly and sober, their interviewer always feeling one wrong word from being sent to his room.

The four Pogacar children were not mollycoddled – there were too many of them for that, Marjeta says – and sorted themselves out before school while the parents earned a living. Mirko used to work in a chair factory and is now involved with his son’s childhood cycling club. Marjeta is a French teacher. Her language skills made her popular at the Tour and for a time everyone wanted a piece of them. It is not a stretch to assume they would happily forgo their pseudo-fame.

“Sometimes I feel that our status in the community has changed because people greet us or they think we are different but we are not different,” Marjeta says. “We stay the same and we work.”

Tadej is the third of four unspoilt children: Barbara and Tilen are older, now working in electrical engineering and logistics; the youngest, Vita, is still in school. Their parents encouraged them into sport, but not for glory and they stipulated that they should stick to a pursuit for a year before switching. As the younger brother, Tadej followed Tilen into football, then basketball and cycling. As Marjeta tells it, Tilen would move on once Tadej had become good.

Every analysis of Tadej mentions his modesty, politeness and simple, unruffled outlook. Mirko says little, and what he does say is in Slovene, but in him you can see how Tadej would be like this. Mirko grew up on his parents’ farm, where his own children would pick potatoes, and he has described his life and parenting as old-fashioned, ensuring his children showed respect and did chores. “Sometimes I regretted that we didn’t have a farm where there was more work to do,” he once wrote.

Tadej was the joker, ensuring spirits were high. When not in the open air, they would play cards: tarok, rummy or enka. “He couldn’t stay quiet,” Marjeta says. “He moved all the time. He was quite, dangerous.” There was the time she saw he had undone his seatbelt and she braked, throwing him forward. There were a few bruises and she regretted what had happened, but he didn’t learn his lesson.

Slovenia is a small nation (Natasa Pirc Musar, the president, prefers “boutique”) about a quarter of the size of Tasmania. Great cyclists are one in a million and that is why Slovenia has two – “Rogla” and “Pogi” – who between them have won six of the past 11 grand tours, forever linked by La Planche des Belles Filles: September 19, 2020, when Pogacar upset a world order that hadn’t even been established.

Slovenia’s rise to the top of cycling was complete, yet the aftermath was not jubilant, but weird and complicated. Teja Hauptman has known Pogacar since he was a child. Her husband, Andrej, the first Slovenian cyclist to win a world championship medal, is his sporting director at UAE Team Emirates. “It was like someone died,” Teja says.

Roglic, aged 30 at the time, was a national hero. Pogacar, nine years younger, was set to follow him up the mountain and then take his country to greater heights. But it did not happen like that. Pogacar snatched the yellow jersey from Roglic on the penultimate stage, turning a 57-second deficit into a 59-second lead over a 36.2km time-trial. He didn’t even mean to, really. Journalists hotfooted it from one home town to the other, Zagorje ob Savi to Komenda. Tadej was no longer tomorrow’s man.

There was a feeling that Pogacar had jumped the queue. Parts of Slovenia were angry. He received emails to that effect. “We felt sorrow for Primoz and we were happy for Tadej – I said I would prefer that Primoz won this Tour.” That is a quote from Marjeta. Even Pogacar’s mother was conflicted.

“My kids were crying, even though they know Tadej better,” Teja Hauptman says. “I was sad after that because I realised that Slovenia was not like, ‘Great, Tadej, great.’ It was like he spoiled something, but he didn’t know that he was spoiling something.

“I can still say that Primoz is No.1 in Slovenia, but not around the world. When you cross the border, Tadej is No.1. I think this is connected with our history. Someone else was governing us and we were always just, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ And we like that people suffer, do a lot of work.”

Marjeta reiterates Slovenia’s love of the “suffering hero”. Roglic’s backstory is compelling: a former ski jumper from coal country who cleaned escalators in a mall and took up cycling at 22, and who is now a four-times Grand Tour champion.

By contrast, everything seems so straightforward for Pogacar: a good youngster who improved steadily, always finished the race and won the Tour at 21. “Our very famous writers, they all mention that struggling, it’s in our genes, and that’s why we like that,” Teja says. “We call them national heroes and of course Primoz is much more a national hero because of that than Tadej, because he’s just a simple guy who plays with the peloton, and it looks very simple and it’s not that interesting.”

Slovenia celebrated the 32nd anniversary of independence on Sunday. Before then it had formed part of a string of empires and then of Yugoslavia. The habit of keeping your head down, of no longer acting like the small constituent of a larger entity, is not easily forgotten. “We had to build our mentality from scratch to something new,” President Musar says. “We were on our own, we had to show our strength.”

There is much for Slovenia to be proud of. Tina Maze (skiing) and Janja Garnbret (climbing) have helped Slovenia to excel in per-capita medals tables at the Olympics, but the active pantheon with global reach comprises three men: Pogacar, Roglic and Luka Doncic, one of the NBA’s best.

In times of triumph, Slovenia honours its athletes in public. The Komenda hippodrome lies empty when I visit, but when Pogacar wins, the celebrants throng. Roglic was feted in the capital’s Congress Square after he won the Giro, assisted by Big Foot Mama, the Slovenian rock band.

Pogacar has used some of his wealth to help the next generation. He started cycling aged nine with Kolesarsko Drustvo Rog, a club founded in 1949 as an offshoot of Ljubljana’s ubiquitous bike factory. He benefited from free equipment when starting out. Without that help, there might not have been enough money for him to explore his passion. After his first Tour win, he did two things: he bought a Porsche, and he invested his money from domestic sponsors in the junior boys’ section of KD Rog, totalling about 150 members and now called Pogi Team.

Pogacar’s early years were typified by his lack of size (his Twitter handle is @TamauPogi, an informal phrase for “Little Pogi”). His first bike was a Billato on which he couldn’t touch the floor, crashing because he didn’t know how to unclip from the pedals. Andrej Hauptman first clocked him when he turned up at a race and saw Tamau struggling to keep up with the peloton, only to be informed that the little boy was in fact about to lap the rest.

Though he may have struggled to learn about keeping his seatbelt on, in cycling Pogacar learns quickly. “Every mistake that he maybe made, he didn’t do it again,” Koncilija says. “Everything he did in races and in training, he just memorised it and he didn’t ask a lot of me. I think he has a lot of (skill in), how should I say, self-teaching problems.” Above all else, Koncilija sees a young man who loves riding and racing, “enjoys making it a spectacle”, and then moves on without baggage.

That lack of baggage may not ingratiate him to the Slovenian psyche, but it makes him a fearsome prospect at cycling’s grandest races. Should he win a third Yellow Jersey next month, even the harshest, most bored critic would surely applaud.

This time, there will undoubtedly have been sporting sranga. For the love of a good cycling race, and of a nation, you have to plough through the obstacle.

The Times