“Time is ticking” - Is Primoz Roglic on the decline after Giro d’Italia disaster?

Two years after his triumphant ride in Rome, Primoz Roglic returned to the Giro d’Italia in 2025 with high hopes and even higher expectations. Backed by the might of Red Bull – BORA – hansgrohe and billed once again as a favourite for pink, the Slovenian instead endured one of the most damaging grand tours of his career, and this is certainly saying something. Four crashes across three weeks, no stage win, and ultimately, abandonment on Stage 16.

The scenes were depressingly familiar. In Wielerflits, veteran Belgian journalist Hugo Coorevits captured it best: “Images of the abandonment of a top favourite during the race are always shot hastily… the rider silently gets into the car, his head bowed.” It was, as Coorevits pointed out, “already the fifth time that he had to abandon the battle in this way in a major tour.”

That line stings, not because it's unfair, but because it's true. The Giro 2025 didn’t just mark a defeat; it’s a continuation of a brutal pattern. Roglic’s palmares is the stuff of legend, four Vueltas, one Giro, an Olympic title, his Grand Tour story has long teetered between brilliance and misfortune. His resilience is legendary, but by definition, follows trauma. And Roglic has had more than his share.

Coorevits reflects on a telling moment from last year’s Critérium du Dauphiné, when Roglic insisted on starting a stage despite a heavy fall the previous day. “Even though he could not even reach into his back pocket with his left arm to get some food,” Coorevits recalls, “Primož did not want to give up.” That stubbornness, once seen as a strength, now raises a more uncomfortable question: is he fighting battles his body no longer wants?

Roglic’s 2025 Giro never looked convincing. There were crashes no one saw clearly, as Coorevits notes: “There is often a haze of uncertainty surrounding Rogla's falls. Rarely, if ever, are they properly captured on film.” The crash on the gravel in Tuscany, the recon incident before the second time trial, the spill in Gorizia, each one chipped away at his chances and, perhaps, his confidence.

The clearest sign something was wrong came before his withdrawal. “He never sprinted for the bonus seconds,” Coorevits points out. For a rider who built a career on collecting marginal gains, snatching seconds wherever possible, that silence was deafening.

Still, the speculation around Roglic’s future erupted the moment he left the race. “He’s done,” claimed a young podcaster, quoted by Coorevits. But the Belgian journalist was quick to push back: “Maybe. But I think it’s too early for such assertive statements.” And he’s right, remember less than a year ago Roglic bounced back from another Tour disaster to win the Vuelta.

He turns 36 in October. And while age doesn’t define a cyclist’s end, it certainly narrows the runway. “Time is ticking,” Coorevits acknowledges, adding that Roglic’s dream of winning the Tour still burns bright, especially after the heartbreak of 2020, when he lost yellow to Tadej Pogacar in the now infamous Planche des Belles Filles time trial.

But the landscape has changed. Back then, Roglic looked like the most complete GC rider in the world. Now, he’s one of four or five outsiders behind the trident of Pogacar, Vingegaard, and Evenepoel. Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is would Roglic still be going if he had won that Tour title in 2020?

Coorevits closed with a poignant reference to another cycling legend, “Miguel Indurain is the most striking example: in the Tour in 1996 he was outpaced by Bjarne Riis, and in the subsequent Vuelta a España he turned around during a stage and cycled back to the hotel. ‘Miguelón’ had understood that his time was up.”