“It’s becoming a big frustration for us" - Jayco AlUla trainer on the struggle to match Tadej Pogacar

Tadej Pogacar will enter the 2025 Tour de France as the man to beat. A three-time Maillot Jaune winner and the reigning world champion, the Slovenian has been incredibly hard to stop over the last couple of years, much to the growing frustration of rival teams.

There's a well-known saying in boxing that every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and for many of the peloton's leading teams, racing against Pogacar over the last couple years has been something akin to receiving knockout blow after knockout blow. At the aforementioned upcoming Tour de France, Team Jayco AlUla will head to the Grand Tour with their general classification ambitions resting on the shoulders of Ben O'Connor, runner-up to Pogacar at the World Championships in 2024.

Whether or not O'Connor can seriously threaten Pogacar over three weeks though, is a much different challenge. “It’s hard to find the answer to the question of how to compete with a rider like Pogacar. He seems to only get better," explains Team Jayco AlUla trainer Peter Leo in conversation with Velo. 

“We will maybe know more about what we can do in the future. But at the moment, it’s sometimes difficult to understand what we see, given the background information we have from our own riders in the same race,” continues Leo. “We can make our guesses at what Pogacar does. It’s something we’re not sure how to match when there’s such a massive gap.”

The frustration for Leo and teams likes Jayco is that even when their riders post career best numbers when competing against the world champion, they are still soundly beaten. “It’s becoming a big frustration for us in the performance group,” Leo admits honestly. “You see your riders achieving a bunch of PBs, but it’s still not enough to follow Pogacar and the rest of these guys.”

“It’s hard for us to understand what they’re doing and why we can’t match them,” he adds. “We do what we can, but there’s no ‘magic solution.'”