“He was especially good in stage races. I rode the Peace Race that year, and that was one of the first manifestations of his enormous talent,” Verschaeve recalls in an inteview for WielerRevue.
Pogacar kept a low profile throughout the race’s opening stages, including a “mere” 5th place in the presumably queen stage 2. But on the last day, Pogacar struck and completely stole the show with a long attack – something that would later become his trademark move.
“He rode ahead of the peloton for the entire stage, whereas he didn’t stand out much in the first few days. That showed he was tougher and recovered much better. When everyone was fresh, he didn’t perform as well, relatively speaking, at that moment. He didn’t really look like a racer either. He had a lean build with a layer of baby fat on top.”
Late bloomer
Verschaeve accredits Pogacar’s rapid glow up after graduating from juniors to a reasonable training plan which left a lot of room for growth at later age.
“At first glance, you wouldn’t have said that he would become the best rider in the world. To be honest, I think that back then he wasn’t training very hard and wasn’t as focused on his career as we were. That also explains why he wasn’t yet so dominant in one-day races, because those races are very trainable.
“No bizarrely long training sessions”
And that Peace Race performance was not even Pogacar’s biggest result of that season. Two months later, he lined up to the Tour de l’Avenir and won, ahead of Thymen Arensman and Gino Mäder. Pogacar was helped at the race also by Izidor Penko, who himself was a formidable timetrialist (2nd at under-23 European Championships 2018) but never turned professional, and retired at the end of that year.
“We had prepared well, but you have to understand that the Slovenian federation didn’t have the resources of a Belgian federation,” says Penko. “But Tadej is a fighter and didn’t shy away from the competition.”
“I was eleven years old when I met him for the first time. The bike was bigger than Tadej, but I immediately remember how cheerful and competitive he was. He wasn’t afraid of anything.”
“I wouldn’t say that he wasn’t professional as a promising youngster, but he wasn’t someone who did bizarrely long training sessions or anything like that. You did see other riders in the youth categories doing training runs of more than two hundred kilometers, or performing grueling interval sessions. Tadej still had reserves when he turned pro. That has made the difference in recent years.”