"He can still improve, for sure" - Has Tadej Pogacar not reached his limit? UAE coaches weight in

On paper, all riders can improve in pro cycling currently. So, it is something to be taken with a grain of salt, but UAE Team Emirates - XRG coach and head of performance Javier Sola and Jeroen Swart respectively admit that Tadej Pogacar has possibly not yet reached the best level he can on the bike.

“The question of how much we can improve is something that we cannot really know, but he’s at an age where he is maturing every year a little bit, and he also has more experience, and he can assimilate the training better,” Javier Sola said during the team's media day in Benidorm on the 13th December.

“I think he can still improve, for sure. We will see what the level will be, but he’s a very hard worker, and he takes care of all the details, so we don’t know what the real limit is. We do little details, little changes, but nothing crazy. Because when something is working, it’s better not to touch.”

Pogacar has extensively talked about how his improvement came in the last few years over the assimilation of better and more consistent training and eating habits, whilst his change of coaches to Sola has also played a meaningful role.

“I think he still has indications that he could improve a little bit. I think the margin for improvement gets smaller and smaller each year, but we also thought that before," Jeroen Swart says. He is in charge of performance as a whole at UAE, and keeps up with Pogacar's improvement as closely as with other figures.

"Two years ago, we had no idea how much he could improve, and he has improved dramatically, but I think the changes now will be much smaller. It’s more about being able to sustain that level.” At his current level, Pogacar is able to win almost everything he sets himself in pro cycling, and so UAE does not necessarily need it to improve at the time being, but find ways to maintain it for a few more years.

With Milano-Sanremo, Paris-Roubaix, Vuelta a España and the Olympic Games, the Slovenian viably has goals left to achieve for the coming years, whilst records such as the Tour de France GC wins and even the total amount of monuments are also within reach.

“I don’t think we do anything extraordinary, all of what we do is already in the literature, the science has been published. But I think what we do really well is that we do the basics exceptionally well, and I think most of your performance is in that," Swart adds.

“I mean, we look at other teams launching airplanes (he refers to Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe's stunt, although it is unclear why, ed.) and chasing all kinds of things… We do the basics really, really well, and there are some extras, but we don’t do anything crazy. And I think that’s really the secret sauce, doing things well.”

But a lot of Pogacar's success over other pro riders is due to his genetics. This has been widely understood, and Swart provides further details on what the Slovenian's body does above other riders: “This is a unique attribute of his, his ability to recover. We already discovered that in 2019 when we did metabolomic testing on him. You see it in the Tour. He often posts his best performances in the third week, which is not what you expect".

Why is that? "Normally, we expect a decline in performance, but sometimes, he actually improves. And his ability to recover from stress, whether it’s training or racing, and adapt, is unsurpassed at this point in time. I mean, it’s incredible, his recovery rate. That’s why he’s so good.”