ANALYSIS | What were Tadej Pogacar’s best moments of 2025?

Tadej Pogacar spent 2025 doing exactly what he did in 2024: destroying the competition. A fourth Tours de France title, three Monuments in a single season, back-to-back world titles, and a maiden European crown: the Slovenian superstar is moving closer and closer to GOAT status. He didn’t just win, he bent very different races (white roads, bergs, Alpine giants, Kigali’s walls, Lombardy’s rollers) to the same conclusion. Only Mathieu van der Poel, and Remco Evenepoel on a time trial bike, were able to get the best of him at any point this year.

But, of his incredible season, what were his five best wins? Let’s take a closer look.

On the Passo di Ganda, 37km from Bergamo, Pogacar did what only he seems able to do: stand the race on its head and ride home alone. The win made him the first rider ever to take Lombardia five straight, delivered his 10th Monument, and capped a year in which he also stood on the podium at all five Monuments, numbers that pull his name closer to Merckx and Coppi rather than his own generation.

Remco Evenepoel and Michael Storer couldn’t dent the gap; the rainbow jersey simply kept floating away. It was his third Monument of 2025 after Flanders and Liège, a record-tilting haul that underlines his range as a rider as well as his legendary ability. GOAT talk isn’t hype when you’re re-writing records in real time.

Hautacam in 2025 wasn’t just a stage win; it was payback for 2022. Back then, Visma cracked him here with Vingegaard and Van Aert. This time he lit the fuse with 12.5km to climb and turned the Pyrenean amphitheatre into a solo time trial, dropping Jonas Vingegaard immediately and everyone else with a clarity that numbers can’t fully explain, only the pictures do. It was his first Hautacam victory, his eighth Pyrenean stage, and the 20th Tour stage of his career.

3 years earlier, he had suffered in the heat and under the might of Jumbo-Visma, but he kept the receipt and delivered one of his most devastating performances this time around. For a four-time Tour champion, the best stage is the one that neutralises a history lesson, and Hautacam did exactly that. If the yardstick is all-time greatness, answering a scar on the very climb where it was inflicted is heavy evidence. The yellow jersey looked inevitable, Hautacam made it feel definitive in just the second week of the Tour.

The Kwaremont has decided careers; in April it decided a debate. When Pogacar surged there, he snapped the elastic to Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert and Mads Pedersen, then soloed the final 15km to a second Ronde title.

Just over a week earlier, Van der Poel had denied Pogacar at Milano-Sanremo. But this time, Pogacar gained his revenge. Pedersen beat Van der Poel for second, Van Aert rolled in fourth, the podium order emphasising just how hard he’d hit them. Flanders is supposed to be their turf, their angles, their muscle memory. He turned it into a climb race on cobbles and forced everyone to solve a problem they couldn’t.

Winning Lombardia is of course no surprise, but even now he has won in Flanders twice, it still doesn’t add up. How can a GC man drop the big men on the cobbles? It wasn’t just that he won; it was who he dropped, where he did it, and how cleanly the move landed. That’s the sign of a legend.

Just like in Zurich last year, Kigali demanded a ruler’s long move and got one. Pogacar became the first man since Sagan to retain the road world title, and he did it on Rwanda’s savage ramps with the kind of long-range effort that leaves no argument, just daylight. Remco Evenepoel took silver, Ben Healy bronze, but the rainbow returned to the same shoulders it wore over the previous 12 months.

It matters that it came late in the season, after a spring of Monuments and a summer wrapped in yellow, Pogacar showed he is the best all year round. Two straight world titles across two different courses harden the GOAT case because they’re single-day, national-team tests where control is impossible and chaos is standard.

Cast your mind back to the first big race of 2025. The unofficial modern monument saw Pogacar tried and tested in a different way than usual, but he still demolished his rivals. Even a heavy fall on the sterrato couldn’t keep him from a third Strade crown. Battered and chasing, he recalibrated the race, bridged, and then forced the selection again before dropping Tom Pidcock and marching up Via Santa Caterina to Piazza del Campo like the script had never changed.

Strade looks tailor-made for him, but great riders are judged on the days when the plan blows up. The win was an early prologue to what turned out to be another dominant season for Pogacar, and a desperate one for most of his rivals.

Whether it was on the cobbles, gravel, or tarmac, Pogacar was king in 2025. But which of the above moments was your favourite?