The INEOS physiotherapist who was better than Tadej Pogacar: "He was not the best of his generation"
Cycling
Martin Hvastija, Slovenia's under-23 coach, talked about Tadej Pogacar's early years and how there was expected to be above the current World Champion back in those days.
He is Ziga Jerman, now a physiotherapist for the INEOS Greandiers team. The former rider was born in Ljubljana in 1998, the same year as Pogacar and, according to Hvastija, he was better than him: "Although it's hard to believe, he was not the best of his generation," he told Relevo. Jerman had more victories than Pogacar until before the 2018 Tour del'Avenir in which he confirmed himself as a promise of world cycling that he would confirm the following year with a very complete 2019 where he won three stages at the Vuelta a España and finished on the final podium.
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Of course, Hvastija doesn't deny that they didn't see Pogi's talent, simply that at the time Jerman was better: "The coaches of his club, Radenska, including Andrej Hauptman, now coach of UAE Team Emirates, always told me that they had a super talented kid in their team."
Thus, the professional career of the promising Jerman ended without victories in 2022 at just 23 years of age after abandoning in the fourth stage of the Vuelta Belgrade Banjaluka. He did not win a single race as a professional, which makes it very clear how complicated the transition to the pros is and that the cases of Pogi, Juan Ayuso, Antonio Morgado or Isaac del Toro are anomalies within the difficulty of turning professional and continuing to perform as they had in the lower categories.
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Antonio Morgado or Isaac del Toro haven't achieved much yet and given how the UAE team uses them , may not for some time
His palmares make that clear. He wasn't not destroying elite fields in his age group. He wasn't the below average, elite rider Froome was until he got access to special potions. But he wasn't someone you'd expect to even win a single grand tour as a 16yr old. You'd expect him to maybe develop into a solid rider with possible stage wins as a domestique. *We have a history of Cavendish, Sagan, Contador, Schleck, Armstrong, Cancellara being obvious stars of the future by the time they were 15 or 16. Of course they too all needed "special tools" to win at the highest level. Pogi didn't exactly come from nowhere but he absolutely wasn't on the world map because he never showed that kind of potential until he was 18. Its quite unorthodox.
What you say flies in the face of all the stories about him from when he was younger - and if you’re suggesting that his Tour de l’Avenir win came out of the blue, what about all his previous wins? Anyone winning the Tour de l’Avenir is on the world map, and he was already being noticed as an 11 or 12 year old racing with the 16 year olds.
I would like to remind you that VERY few early prodigies end up being world stars in speed or endurance events and very few champions/record holders held youth age records or titles. When I ran in the UK as a teen everyone was looking at certain names for the future, NONE of them prevailed, most disappeared and in the end some unnoticed late bloomers came along for the world to discover. My grandfather was national 800m champion, a neighbour trained with was way better than him but never took up racing. I recruited a rugbyman for our club to run the UK 100m U17 sprint final, just missing the podium (but never having done one day of specific training) never running again. Exact same story as Pog can be told about Jungels, always beaten by a guy who abandoned cycling. Every kid develops differently (Remco?), and early performance means almost nothing. I ran better in my mid 40s than late teens.
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- I disagree. If you have lower weight, you will bounce more at the same speed, meaning that you will spend more time in the air and shorter time on the ground, as a consequence, when you are on the ground you have to produce more force for the same speedvappaxbipmv04-04-2025
- That’s not quite true, even steep climbs and sudden gradient changes can be considered as remaining tangential to the wheel whereas the occasional dip between cobbles a wheel drops into cannot, as such riding over cobbles can become like a permanent surmounting of small obstacles that hit back into your wheel slowing you drastically if you don’t have the right rhythm to “fly” on the mounds, here again the greater the momentum the less these obstacles reduce your speed. But, it is but one factor, you cannot decide on this alone. Like with natural surface ripple formation on desert tracks used by vehicles, there is an optimal speed range to efficiently pass over such surfaces, too fast or slow and your car gets shaken to pieces from the “harmonics” in the vibrations caused. Pretty sure the same applies to riding on cobbles.Mistermaumau04-04-2025
- I am saying I have an open mind at the moment for your cobbles theory but cannot agree with your wind statement (and by extrapolation sprinting since that implies speeds where wind is by far the limiting factor). Had you argued all things not being equal I could have agreed with you but if we thus assume 2 objets of the same size and speed but with differing weights, it is completely obvious that the lighter one will suffer faster in the wind. Extrapolate to the extreme, drop stuff off cliffs or just remember your momentum equations to verify. Now, obviously in real life we have to assume riders of different weights won’t have the same wind hitting surface but you cannot generalise at all then as you can have very unaerodynamic light riders and very aerodynamic heavy ones because it isn’t weight that defines CdA, Teslas have an incredible CdA and are ridiculously heavy, and someone like Harry Levreyssen is a Tesla in cycling.Mistermaumau04-04-2025
- When Roglic beat Geraint Thomas on the last day's TT at the Giro, I remember just how unbelievably emotional his team was. One guy, I forget who, German rider I think, was interviewed and was nearly speechless with a really drawn out "fuuuuuuuuuck it's incredible" comment. And then something even more amazing happened. Geraint Thomas came through the ranks of the Jumbo Visma riders and congratulated them all. True, honest, sincere, sportsmanlike, and celebratory of what had been achieved. Here he was, getting second, and he meant it. And cycling these days is like that, as you say - the way Pogacar hugged Matthews in Quebec, the way Matthews congratulated Pogacar in Montreal, on and on they honor and respect each other. It's pretty great.RidesHills04-04-2025
- Not sure exactly what you are saying, but if you're implying that being heavier is helpful if you're going against the wind or sprinting, then no, it isn't. Ceteris paribus (all else held equal) being a lighter cyclist is always better, save downhill. The reason why heavier cyclists do relatively better than lighter ones on flatter courses is because they will have to have a higher power than the lighter cyclist in order to have any chance at all against them, and flatter courses mean that the lighter cyclist has nowhere to display the better power to weight ratio, meaning that significant ratio is power to CdA, which is usually an advantage to the heavier cyclist.acem8204-04-2025
- Going over bumps is equivalent to going over many small climbs. Lower weight is always a good thing (ceteris paribus) except when going downhill, and even then it's not that advantageous if the downhill is at all technical.acem8204-04-2025
- my formative years in racing were in the 80s and 90s. back then the tone of the peloton was HARSH, aggressive, unfriendly and often mean. amateur racers just modeled what they saw from the pros, so many of the guys a raced with and against were outright a$$hole$, by choice. my great hope is that the amateur ranks now model the tone of kindness and support and compassion that we see in the pro peloton NOW. the greatest stars — tadej, wout, mathieu, demi, kasia, and on and on, never say an unkind word about their brothers and sisters in the peloton, and are often the first even in defeat to hug and congratulate the winner. these are better times in my opinion. maybe some fans miss the “get your hate on” tone of the older days. i do not.OCexile04-04-2025
- That was one of the best interviews. Coming from the best guy in the world Pogi has so much class. Of course he wants to beat MVDP And sees him as the biggest rival. I kind of felt it was a set up to ask Pogi about Wout being a rival. If he was truly honest, he might have said Wout isn’t a threat at this point. Instead, he just laid out the facts and added some opinions that didn’t diminish the respect he ultimately has for Wout or any competitor for that matter even if they aren’t a threat. Pogi is a master at showing sportsmanship. When he loses to MVDP It’s not a big deal and he’s laughing and goofing around and all giddy as if he did win. He just truly loves racing more than he loves winning. Truly a delight to see him on the podium No matter what step he’s on.Onepiece04-04-2025
- The cherry-picked headline makes it sound like MvDP is making an arrogant statement, but reading his statement in full reveals that it's more of a cautious optimism.
KerisVroom04-04-2025 - Pride and overconfidence strike again. Come on Wout! What a bonehead. They had a royal flush in spades and folded the hand. He knows he’s not in his best form after recovering from all the injuries. These are not normal circumstances for a sprint. They should have played tactics and put Powless to the sword by individually attacking thus wearing him out to cover all the attacks. If they wore him out wout MAY have won. It’s sad to see a guy go from insane pride to whimpering dog like that. Yes Wout is under immense pressure, so make some wise and shrewd decisions buddy! Standing there on the podium in 2 or 3 spot he always has the look of a sourpuss sore loser. Show some class buddy! Better success next timeOnepiece04-04-2025