The INEOS physiotherapist who was better than Tadej Pogacar: "He was not the best of his generation"

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.

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.