Four days ago, after Tadej Pogačar‘s latest knock-out victory at Andorra, when UAE Team Emirates-XRG head of racing Joxean Fernández Matxin warned that nothing could ever be taken for granted in cycling, to be honest, it was hard not to think that this was simply stating a formality.
Just look at Vingegaard, Matxin had pointed out, just when he was getting stronger in the Tour de France this July, “there was a roundabout, a crash and that was it.” One of the Tour’s most established figures, a five-times podium finisher and double winner had suddenly fallen by the wayside for 2026. Or, Matxin added, referring to the hailstorms that battered the Vuelta on stage 3, “who could have imagined that happening two kilometres before it did? Nobody.”
With the considerable benefit of hindsight, and given the events some 30 kilometres from the finish of stage 8 of the Vuelta a España, Matxin’s words at Andorra seem uncannily prophetic.
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Certainly, and with all due respect to Jonas Vingegaard, when it came to Pogačar, such has been the scale of his success for the last three years, it was far harder to imagine that the Slovenian could suffer such a brutal reversal of fortune as he did on the roads of Valencia on Saturday afternoon.
Since 2024, in fact, the number of races that Pogačar wanted to win and didn’t can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. And as for the ones he did conquer, from the Tour de France and the Tour of Flanders to the Tre Valli Varesine, the list has been almost endless. At the same time, since his heavy fall in Liège-Bastogne-Liège of 2023, breaking his wrist, and the loss of the Tour de France that followed, the setbacks have been minimal, and essentially have served as reminders of his crushing superiority in every race he started.
Yes, he took six starts to win Milan-Sanremo this year, and his goal of winning Paris-Roubaix remains – after two attempts – still on the agenda. But there was that crash in Sanremo this year, too, and he still got back up and won. Equally, as soon as he announced he was taking part in the Vuelta a España, the only question, realistically, was who would be finishing second and how quickly he would put the GC out of reach.
Pogačar’s aura of invulnerability has increased exponentially with each triumph, even if the real reason for his success is due to a huge number of factors, with his own dedication to the sport and the sheer hard graft of training, as well as the constantly rising level of performance across the board of his entire team, not least amongst them.
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The answer regarding the speed of Pogačar’s rise to the top in the Vuelta seemed to have been reached at Andorra, which he ended with an advantage of over three minutes and a leader’s jersey that, for all the media speculation about possibly ‘loaning’ it to another team to ease the pressure on his squad for a while, seemed increasingly unrealistic.
Even the unexpected arrival of rival Movistar’s Enric Mas on the summit of the Puerto de El Bartolo on stage 6 alongside Pogačar seemed anecdotal, given the ease with which the Slovenian subsequently shrugged aside the opposition, almost without trying, 24 hours later on the ascent to Aramón Valdelinares.
With that in mind, if we look at it in sporting terms, the sudden exit of the world’s number 1 from the Vuelta carries far more impact than any ‘normal’ abandon by the other top names. Following his crash out, UAE are rightly prioritizing the rider’s health and wellbeing above any other considerations. But for the race, the Pogačar-shaped power vacuum that so abruptly appeared when he finally had to admit he could not continue and clamber into the ambulance is one with massive consequences for the Vuelta too.
Historically, too, for a rider to be dominating a Grand Tour on the level Pogačar was doing at the Vuelta and then to crash out is, fortunately, a real rarity. There was the case of Chris Froome in the 2014 Tour, where the Briton was defending champion and standout favourite, but when Froome abandoned after falling on the Roubaix cobbled stage, he wasn’t in yellow and certainly hadn’t shown the degree of domination Pogačar has displayed since day 1 of the Vuelta.
Possibly the closest in a Grand Tour would be much further back, in 1971, when race leader Luis Ocaña had an advantage of over five minutes on Eddy Merckx and looked set to end the Belgian’s stranglehold on Grand Tours. But a sudden fall on the rain-soaked Col de Menté, just when Merckx was on the point of admitting defeat (and had reportedly already done so to Ocaña), upended the race completely, as Ocaña abandoned.
Comparisons between cycling’s eras don’t really work out but on one level at least, we are now in the Vuelta a España, but not with a non-conformist, erratically brilliant racer like Ocaña, but with the Eddy Merckx of modern-day bike racing himself.
As Larry Warbasse sagely put it after the finish of stage 8, the Vuelta GC has suddenly been flung wide open following the absence of the number 1 favourite to win it, but at the same time, as he said, absolutely nobody wanted to see Pogačar leave like this. Either way, Sunday morning’s start of the Vuelta will see the race move into a very different kind of terrain to 24 hours earlier. And whoever stands the tallest on the winner’s podium in Granada on the evening of September 13, the reminder that nobody, not even Pogačar, can avoid cycling’s unpredictable edge will endure regardless, for a long time to come.
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