Tadej Pogacar at Soudal - Quick-Step? Patrick Lefevere recalls his "big missed opportunity"

Tadej Pogacar has taken the cycling world by storm over recent years, emerging not only as arguably the greatest rider of his generation, but perhaps the greatest of all time. Given this immense talent, there were surely numerous teams following the Slovenian as a youth. One of these was Soudal - Quick-Step, as former team boss Patrick Lefevere recently detailed.

In his column for Het Nieuwsblad, Lefevere recalled how he sent Joxean Matxin (now team boss of UAE Team Emirates - XRG), to Slovenia in order to give a detailed report of the future world champion. "When he arrived there and went through the list of bib numbers, it turned out that Pogacar was riding behind the peloton," Lefevere remembers with a chuckle. "Matxin spoke to the youth coach: 'Am I coming to Slovenia especially for a rider who can't keep up?' It turned out that our Matxin had not seen it completely right for once: 'He is about to lap everyone, sir.'"

Obviously, as we all now know, this was merely a sign of things to come for Pogacar, with the Slovenian going on to take multiple Grand Tours, Monuments and other notable victories over the years. So why did Soudal - Quick-Step not pull the trigger after Matxin's more than positive scout report? Quite simply, the answer is financial. "There was only so much money and there were only so many places within our program," explains Lefevere in conclusion. "It is too easy to make a big missed opportunity out of that with today's knowledge."