Special win in a special place for me ❤️ Grazie a tutti 🙏🇮🇹
Whilst in truth, the Giro d'Italia has looked decided for some time, Tadej Pogacar made sure that absolutely no one would be left in any doubt on stage 15. After his latest stage win, a fourth of the race, the UAE Team Emirates leader now holds a more than comfortable 6:41 advantage in the fight for the Maglia Rosa.
The queen stage of the race, stage 15 was seen by many to be the last chance for any of Pogacar's rivals to mount a serious threat to the Slovenian. Instead, it was a day where any remaining hope was well and truly squashed by the rampant Maglia Rosa as he soloed to the victory by 29 seconds from the last remainder of the breakaway, Nairo Quintana and nearly three minutes to the rest of the GC leaders.
"He is just unreal. There is not much more you can say about him," reflected ex-pro turned Eurosport expert, Adam Blythe on The Breakaway post-stage. "We are getting lost for words, and it is really hard to appreciate and understand how good that man actually is. He is on his own here, and because of the level that he is at, he is just a lot better than everyone else. He is getting better and better and is turning into an absolute beast. He is a machine."
"He just takes it apart. We are running out of superlatives. He just keeps going and going and his appetite is never satisfied," added Blythe's Eurosport co-analyst and sprinting legend, 12-time Giro d'Italia stage winner, Robbie McEwen. "He says that he wants to be the greatest of all time, and that was a cannibalistic approach to the stage. It is thrilling, and I'm sure for every Tadej Pogacar fan, they are in absolute ecstasy."
"That was just mindblowing. The gap he opened up within a kilometre of attacking, it was just a man on a different level to everyone else in the race," assessed Daniel Lloyd, with the expert trio in complete shock at the sheer dominance they had just witnessed. "I'm not even sure that was the plan for UAE Team Emirates. It's been years we have been watching these exploits from Tadej Pogacar and you are still astounded when you see him do it again. It is just next-level stuff, and it is unbelievable to watch."
Special win in a special place for me ❤️ Grazie a tutti 🙏🇮🇹