“Tadej normally loses less than 1%” - UAE performance chief reveals frightening reason Pogacar can still attack when rivals fade
Cycling
Tadej Pogacar’s most damaging Tour de France attacks often come when everyone else should be running out of road, legs and oxygen. For UAE Team Emirates – XRG, that ability is not being treated as mystery or instinct alone.
Ahead of Pogacar’s bid for a fifth yellow jersey, UAE head of performance Jeroen Swart has offered a rare look at the physical trait behind the Slovenian’s late-race destruction. It comes down to durability: the ability to keep producing close to maximum power after a long, brutal workload.
The number behind Pogacar’s late attacks
In a detailed interview with CyclingNews, Swart explained why Pogacar can still launch and sustain those long-range attacks after the kind of mountain stages that strip most riders back from their best level.
“Tadej normally loses less than 1% of his fresh performance despite having done 4,500 kilojoules of work, which is why he's able to do these long attacks late in a race and get away and stay away,” said Swart. “Other riders are starting to have that fatigue and that's one of his key attributes, his ability to have exceptional durability at a very high workload. In Tadej's case, his durability is exceptional.”
From 2022 weakness to Tour-winning weapon
One of Pogacar’s most famous Tour defeats came on exactly the kind of day Swart is describing. In 2022, Jonas Vingegaard and Team Visma | Lease a Bike broke the race on the Col du Granon after a huge mountain stage, turning Pogacar’s aura of control into visible vulnerability.
Swart pointed directly to that stage when explaining how Pogacar’s durability has changed. “Previously, that was a weakness of Tadej,” he said. “When he lost the Tour de France in 2022, that was on a stage that exceeded 4,200 kilojoules of energy expenditure. So one thing that the strength work does is it maintains the ability of muscles to perform.”
The old blueprint was to make the day long, hard and chaotic, then see whether Pogacar could still respond when the race reached the final climb. In Swart’s telling, UAE have spent years working on the exact point where the Tour slipped away in 2022.
Why torque work matters late in the stage
The training detail behind that shift is not only about producing a sharper acceleration in the moment. Swart said UAE have used low-cadence torque work and strength training to help Pogacar keep his power available deep into the hardest stages, when repeated climbs and attacks have already emptied much of the field.
“If you lift heavy weights and then have to lift a very light weight repeatedly, your ability to lift that light weight repeatedly will be enhanced compared to if you hadn't lifted heavy weights in the first place,” he explained. “If you have some extra strength in those muscles, then you can harness that strength late in a race or late in a stage, and that improves the durability, the ability to perform close to your fresh level.”
Tadej Pogacar at the 2026 Tour de France team presentation
Fuel, fatigue and the final climb
Swart also pointed to fuelling as one of the major areas where modern performance has shifted. While most teams have moved towards far higher carbohydrate intake, he stressed that taking in more energy only matters if the body has been trained to use it properly. “You have to train the guts to absorb it,” he said, explaining that glucose and fructose absorption can both be trained and increased.
According to Swart, newer drink mixes with a changed glucose-to-fructose ratio have allowed riders to reach “110 to 120 grams an hour”, while lactate is also becoming part of the conversation as an additional fuel source.
“Fueling has become a huge factor in terms of the enhancement in performance that we've seen,” he said. “It's really a big change that's happened in the last 5 years, and we can't underestimate that contribution to the performances that we've seen.”
Pogacar’s attacks do not only hurt because of the watts he can produce fresh. They hurt because he can still find close to that level after 4,000 or 4,500 kilojoules, on the final climb, when others are already starting to pay for the day.
Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel, Florian Lipowitz, Paul Seixas and the rest of the GC field will still search for days hard enough to test him. The stage that broke Pogacar in 2022 now sits inside UAE’s explanation for why he keeps riding away.
Kieran WoodDeputy Editor-in-Chief
Kieran Wood is a sports journalist based in Wales and has been active in journalism since 2022. He regularly contributes to DartsNews.com and CyclingUpToDate.com, where he covers professional cycling and darts. In cycling, his work includes liveblogs from major races, including the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and La Vuelta a España, alongside race reports and analysis. He has also conducted interviews with professional riders.
His reporting spans the full racing calendar, from one-day classics to stage races, with a focus on accurate, real-time coverage and clear contextual analysis. For statistics, results, and historical context, he regularly uses resources such as ProCyclingStats. To support reporting on rider activity and training context where relevant, he also references Strava.
In his work, Kieran places strong emphasis on careful sourcing, editorial accuracy, and updating articles as new, verified information becomes available.
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- and another no-news article around the ‚2 tokyo jogging rounds‘ headline, this time spiced with some days old ‚news‘ that the LA and japan vacation trips come during or after the tdf route release. i am getting more and more annoyed by this time-stealing no-news crap. but who am i to complain? nobody forces me to come back for more ‚news‘ day after day …Ketterechts02-11-2026
- It would likely be a very steep section of 4.1 km, not changing the average gradient considerably, with the climb remaining 10.1 km at 11.8%. It would reach 20% on the gravel. It would start 1.6 km in, and finish with 4.2 km left to climb (before the short final descent)
Rafionain-Glas02-11-2026 - Welcome to the off-season.
santiagobenites02-11-2026 - guillaume martin is wuite a surprise as a gc rider.Ketterechts02-11-2026
- Who cares what Bruyneel thinks. He and his best mate Lance, the biggest fraud in the history of sport, have no place commenting on anything but how to lie and cheat!whit2pet02-11-2026
- Eeesh!Lozza02-11-2026
- bravo! a rider likes jonas needs motivation and he needs to believe in being able to reach goals. he - like anybody else in the world - doesn't believe that he can win the tdf with pogi present. and what's it worth for when pogi is not there? second class victory only. he has checked all three grand tours, so what is left if not retire? the classics! go for it, jonas!Ketterechts02-11-2026
- i am sure that under the pretext of medical examination a lot worse has happened when they were under.abstractengineer02-11-2026
- dude, Lemond never even was in the same race as Armstrong. He throws all these aspersions on other American riders who might usurp his throne as the greatest ever American racer. He doesn't say a single thing about (foreign) dopers who he actually raced against. Biggest douchebag move ever. I used to revere that guy, now I despise him. His actions are so weird.fatsupermodel02-11-2026
- This is just stupid, You do what you are good at not what you are weak at. He has no results to speak of when he participated. Even Froome, Conatdor had very little. With Pogi there he wont win none of the classics. he is already 30+ with a few years left at the top. It takes years to get good at classics. Is that really worth the effort???abstractengineer02-11-2026
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