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"It’s a pretty weak Giro for the GC" - No one will even come close to Tadej Pogacar claims Team Jayco AlUla DS Matt White
CyclingTuesday, 30 April 2024 at 10:27
With Grand Tour season in the men's World Tour almost upon us, UAE Team Emirates leader Tadej Pogacar will start as overwhelming pre-race favourite for the Giro d'Italia. Although Team Jayco AlUla have their own GC ambitions, sports director Matt White cannot see anyone coming close to the Slovenian superstar.
"He’s not beatable. I don’t believe he is. It’s the best sprint field that the Giro has ever seen but it’s a pretty weak Giro for the GC," White told GCN. "Honestly, I can’t see anyone beating Pogacar and I wouldn’t be surprised if he went after the Giro d’Italia leader’s jersey on day one or two because his team won’t have to ride on the front for the first week, and then he’ll squeeze whenever he needs to and take time."
One of those regarded as a likely challenger to Pogacar is INEOS Grenadiers leader, Geraint Thomas, who finished second at the Giro d'Italia in 2023, losing out to Primoz Roglic by just 14 seconds over the three weeks. "INEOS have a better and more rounded team but that doesn’t really matter, because how do you beat him?" White questions. "No one in that race can outclimb him and no one in the race can beat him in the two time trials. It’s 70km of time trialling, so there would have to be some massive mess-up for them to take time on him."
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For Team Jayco AlUla it will be Eddie Dunbar and Luke Plapp who lead the general classification charge. White is realistic enough to admit though, that barring any injury on illness to the Slovenian, it's unlikely Pogacar will be beaten by anyone. “It does only take illness or a crash to change things but does anyone see the other rivals challenging Pogacar? Not on any given Sunday really,” White concludes.
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024