Bradley Wiggins: Pogacar "would have out-climbed me"

Former Tour de France winner ten years ago Bradley Wiggins has talked about the rise of Tadej Pogacar and how the style of racing in the peloton has changed in the last decade. The Briton told on Eurosport that the aggressive style of racing currently in the peloton would've put him under difficulties if he had faced it.

“It’d be very, very difficult. I think I might have struggled actually. He’s a great time trialist. He would have out-climbed me. He’s got that youthful exuberance where there’s a naivety around him, where he doesn’t quite realise in some ways what he’s achieving. Although he does - there is a contradiction in that because he’s willing to take risks. He’s willing to attack far from the finish," Wiggins said.

“By the time I won the Tour de France, I’d lost all that. I was becoming an old gear and I had to be very calculated. I did measure my efforts and we raced in a way with Sky that rode to my powers and my strength which was time-trialling and riding threshold. And I think had we done that Pogacar would have attacked over the top and made it very difficult for us. So it would have been very, very difficult to challenge him," he added.

Wiggins went on to say: “I think the only thing we could have done which Dave [Brailsford] probably would have done - and I’m surprised he hasn’t done - is throw a load of money at him, buy him and send him to the Giro.”

The former Tour de France winner also added that he doesn't think he would thrive the same way in the peloton nowadays in comparison to the kind of racing he faced: "My first Giro d’Italia in 2003 I raced with Cipollini, who was world champion at this time. Marco Pantani raced that Giro. We used to ride from kilometre zero really slowly and just get faster, faster, faster all day, and I used to like that calibration. That was a school of education I came from. So the way how it lends itself to more crashes or appears to lend itself to more crashes, more unpredictability, everyone feels that they have a chance of winning - I think it changes the way that riders train in the sport, the way teams race together."

He concluded: “And the competitiveness week after week - riders want to notch up victories because contracts are scarce at the end of the year and there’s a lot more pressure on riders to get results because results equal contracts in this day and age.”