![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2287793780.jpg\")
LeMond (second left) applauds Poga\u010dar as he wins his fifth yellow jersey in Paris. Getty Images<\/p>\nThree-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond never needs to be asked twice to stick the boot into old adversary Lance Armstrong \u2013 and with good reason.<\/p>\n
So, when interviewed by L\u2019Equipe during this year\u2019s Tour de France, nominally about the feats of Tadej Poga\u010dar, he went in two-footed once more after the reporter brought Armstrong\u2019s seven \u2018wins\u2019 into the conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cLance didn\u2019t have his talent. He \u2018found\u2019 it at 28,\u201d he said, the inference being Armstrong\u2019s ability wasn\u2019t innate, but medically enhanced. Who could possibly argue?<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people are born with a high VO2 max. That has nothing to do with a guy who has a low VO2 max and wins seven Tours de France,” he continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no doubt that Poga\u010dar has exceptional talent. Every now and then, among millions of people, there is one who has 3 or 4% more. It is not much, but it changes everything in the Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n
LeMond (second left) applauds Poga\u010dar as he wins his fifth yellow jersey in Paris. Getty Images<\/p>\n
LeMond knows a thing or two about a freak talent with an exceptional VO2 max<\/a> \u2013 he was one of them, having had a phenomenal level of 92.5ml\/kg\/min recorded during his peak racing years.<\/p>\n The figure relates to the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during hard exercise. Oxygen is called upon by the muscles to create energy and power performance, so VO2 max is often seen as a byword for aerobic fitness potential. Anything in the 90s is a rarity.<\/p>\n Armstrong\u2019s figure was reportedly in the low 80s \u2013 a typical level for a pro cyclist \u2013 while even Chris Froome\u2019s was \u2018only\u2019 88.<\/p>\n Froome\u2019s figure was in fact 84.4, recorded during the off-season of 2015 when he was heavier. It was adjusted to 88 to match his lighter July racing weight.<\/p>\n What do we know about Poga\u010dar’s physiology? But back to Poga\u010dar. Nobody \u2013 perhaps outside of his inner circle \u2013 knows what the five-time yellow jersey\u2019s lab-measured VO2 max is.<\/p>\n Unlike Froome, who, similarly to Armstrong, emerged at the top of elite stage racing out of nowhere at the age of 26, Pogacar hasn\u2019t received such deep scepticism about his performances.<\/p>\n No doubt, he gets some \u2013 but the fleeting enquiries that come, often towards the end of another Tour win, are small fry compared to what others have attracted.<\/p>\n As LeMond notes, Poga\u010dar has been winning big since his teenage years, and was the second youngest winner of the Tour de France, aged 21, in 2020. That buys him some insurance.<\/p>\n He\u2019s won on a scale that only Eddy Merckx can match<\/a>, so his performances have been met less with incredulity and more with wide-eyed amazement \u2013 a puff-of-the-cheeks shock at the manner in which he\u2019s been able to rip up the rulebook on how modern pro cycling races operate.<\/p>\n What\u2019s propelling him to this level? What gifts from the gods lie beneath that baby-faced exterior?<\/p>\n There have been only snapshots of official Poga\u010dar physiology, such as the seemingly accidental reveal of a power file on a Strava post earlier in 2026 (which he normally doesn\u2019t share) and snippets in interviews, such as when he told the Peter Attia Drive podcast in 2024 of his huge 340 watts zone 2 power.<\/p>\n That said, much can be unpicked and uncovered using data already out there \u2013 in cycling and elsewhere.<\/p>\n Just look at the things Bellingcat has achieved in its open-sourced journalism investigations, using tools such as social media and Google Earth. Breadcrumb trails are left, unintentionally or not, leading to hidden truths.<\/p>\n A new study due to be published shortly in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance has used similar inspiration to try to crack one of the most sought-after numbers in professional cycling: Tadej Poga\u010dar\u2019s VO2 max. It’s a much bigger extension of a study that one of the authors, Ole Kristian Berg, published last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the researchers, Sebastian Sitko, Kristian Berg and Pedro Valenzuela, the lack of a lab-derived number for the Slovene wasn\u2019t seen so much as a problem as an opportunity for exploration and innovation.<\/p>\n The problem with lab figures, they note, is they aren’t necessarily reliable when it comes to measuring who\u2019s going to be good at winning bike races in the real world.<\/p>\n Norwegian Oskar Svendsen famously recorded one of the highest-ever VO2 max\u2019s, 96.7, in the lab of Lillehammer University College, just before winning the junior world time trial title in 2012. By 2014, his pro career was over. He\u2019s cited in this study by that massive number, if not by name.<\/p>\n While it remains the gold-standard measurement, a lab-based VO2 max test may, in differing circumstances, both overestimate and underestimate the level a rider is capable of achieving in a race.<\/p>\n Influencing factors, the authors say, include static bikes that don\u2019t accurately reflect a bike on the road, not having to account for the outdoors environment when indoors and breathing mask interference.<\/p>\n Perhaps most of all, an indoor test lacks the motivating factor of, say, racing up Alpe d\u2019Huez<\/a> during an infernal Tour stage, chasing down the remnants of the day\u2019s break in pursuit of a near 30-year record.<\/p>\n How did they estimate Poga\u010dar\u2019s VO2 max? The authors buried deep into publicly available data. This included relevant climb stats (length, gradient, altitude), time taken to climb, Poga\u010dar\u2019s publicly available physical data (such as weight), bike weight, air density, dehydration [2% reduction in body weight was assumed for the climbs at the ends of stages], available data from other cyclists on the same day and known power data from other cyclists, including Froome.<\/p>\n They chose to focus on Poga\u010dar\u2019s performance on four climbs over the 2024 and 2025 seasons, the two full seasons of peak Poga\u010dar dominance to date: Plateau de Beille (stage 15) and Isola 2000 (stage 19) from the 2024 Tour de France, Peyragudes (stage 13) from the 2025 Tour and Passo di Ganda (Giro di Lombardia 2025).<\/p>\n They were picked for their distinct character, to include a mountain time trial, high mountains and a one-day race, and also because they were four efforts that were “situations most likely to elicit near-maximal physiological responses”.<\/p>\n Clearly, not every piece of the puzzle was available to the researchers to nail his VO2 max. The result they came to is an estimate, because certain assumptions needed to be made.<\/p>\n Poga\u010dar’s weight is one, but the big ones are his actual power on these climbs \u2013 specifically how close to his aerobic ceiling he was riding \u2013 and gross efficiencies (GE \u2013 more on this shortly).<\/p>\n Instead, they used an equation, with assumptions such as the mass of Poga\u010dar and his equipment, to work out the energy needed to overcome known obstacles such as gravity, and rolling and air resistance.<\/p>\n Figures for each of these could be estimated, using things such as rider mass (gravitational power) and the Rolling Resistance Database (rolling resistance).<\/p>\n This was then compared with publicly available Strava power data from the three closest riders to Poga\u010dar on the finish line.<\/p>\n With the power estimate (corrected to factor in varying altitudes, and the known loss of power the higher the road), they could first work out energy expenditure, then oxygen consumption and finally VO2 max estimates, adjusted to a range of GEs.<\/p>\n This refers to the fact that humans don\u2019t burn energy in the most efficient way and the energy doesn\u2019t burn the same way every time.<\/p>\n Not all of the energy you get from a calorie of food goes into power through the pedals, with plenty lost along the way through heat. The authors used likely GEs often seen in pros like this, between 22 and 24%: the lower the GE, the higher the VO2 max. How each GE influenced the estimated VO2 max is all recorded in their findings. <\/p>\n To validate this model for VO2 max estimation, they verified it with Froome\u2019s data from 2015: he had both competition data available (they used his stage-winning performance on La Pierre St Martin) and a lab-measured VO2 max score from the same season. The result they estimated for Froome, 85.3, was very close to his actual lab measurement (84.4).<\/p>\n What is Poga\u010dar\u2019s estimated VO2 max? As you might suspect of a rider who only a fortnight ago smashed Marco Pantani\u2019s Alpe d\u2019Huez time<\/a> by nearly two minutes, the study found Poga\u010dar\u2019s aerobic capacity to be colossal. Across the four mountain efforts examined, and with three GE assumptions (22, 23 and 24%), his VO2 max is estimated to be between 94 and 98ml\/kg\/min, with an average of 96 \u2013 the same as Svendsen\u2019s lab figure.<\/p>\n The results, say the authors, were in a narrow window that shows a consistency that \u201creinforces their confidence in the model\u201d, reflecting a stable aerobic capacity across types of climb.<\/p>\n What it means There are limitations in the study\u2019s methods, which the authors acknowledge. The word \u2018estimate\u2019 is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and until there\u2019s a lab VO2 max measurement to back it up, or Poga\u010dar’s power files are made public, it remains just that.<\/p>\n That said, the Froome lab and field reference goes some way to giving ballast to the study, while the authors believe the real-world nature of the study may offer a novel glimpse of VO2 max measurement beyond the lab.<\/p>\n What of Poga\u010dar himself? We\u2019ll leave that to the authors: \u201cThe results indicate that the athlete examined in this study exhibits an exceptionally high aerobic capacity that appears to extend beyond currently documented physiological ranges.\u201d<\/p>\n Poga\u010dar\u2019s 2026 Tour de France was his most devastating yet, on every single level: the winning margin, the devastating stage wins, the astonishing single climbing records shattered.<\/p>\n However, even the man himself said there wasn\u2019t any great leap forward from previous seasons in terms of his power numbers. What he did say was his racing brain was getting sharper, and he was learning to make better decisions more regularly.<\/p>\n Perhaps a character as swaggering as Poga\u010dar would test lousily in a sterile lab setting \u2013 he\u2019s a rider who feeds off the atmosphere as much as the lactate gels<\/a> he was quaffing during the Tour.<\/p>\n As is often said of road racing, whatever level you race at, the number in a lab counts for nothing once that flag drops on the road. <\/p>\n It\u2019s how a rider responds in that moment a race is on that separates Poga\u010dar from Svendsen.<\/p>\n Note: we’ll update this article with a link to the study when it becomes publicly available. <\/p>\n Q&A: Sebastian Sitko, study co-author<\/p>\n The study produced a remarkable result and we were keen to put some questions to its authors about its origins, accuracy, limitations and implications.<\/p>\n One of them, Sebastian Sitko, is a sports science professor at the University of Zaragoza, who also coaches pro and amateur cyclists. <\/p>\n He released his training manual, Cycling 2.0: Evidence-Based Training for Peak Performance on the Bike<\/a>, earlier this year and we interviewed him about it in June.<\/a><\/p>\n Where did the idea for this study begin?<\/p>\n It came from two lines of a work meeting. Pedro [Valenzuela, co-author] and I had spent years building the “record power profile” of professional cyclists \u2013 essentially mapping the ceiling of what the human engine produces \u2013 and across 2024 and 2025 Poga\u010dar kept breaking through that ceiling.<\/p>\n In parallel, there had been interesting attempts to put numbers on these rides, from the old Alberto Contador and LeMond analyses in the cycling media to Ole’s [Berg, co-author] own work, but none had been done with the full physiological machinery \u2014 altitude, air density, dehydration, a realistic range of efficiencies \u2014 and then put through peer review.<\/p>\n We wanted to do it properly. We weren’t chasing a headline number. We were asking a scientific question: what does the human body actually have to be capable of to do what he does?<\/p>\n Does this mean that you’ve found a new real-world methodology for estimating VO2 max, and what are the implications of that if so?<\/p>\n [Poga\u010dar’s] VO2 max was the goal, but the validated method turned out to be the more durable result. The pivotal step was testing it on someone we could check: we estimated Chris Froome’s VO2 max from a 2015 climb using only public data and landed at 85.3, against his lab-measured 84.4 \u2013 a difference of less than one point.<\/p>\n That tells us the approach reproduces a known laboratory value from a bike race. The implication is that for the tiny group of athletes who will essentially never do a maximal lab test mid-season, a well-documented climb can act as the laboratory \u2013 for monitoring and for putting performances in context, not for replacing the gold standard. <\/p>\n When your method recovers a known lab value from a race to within a single point, you start to trust what it says about the cases you can’t measure.\u00a0<\/p>\n Poga\u010dar’s ride to Alpe d’Huez this summer was probably his best climb yet. Were you keen to run those numbers through your model?<\/p>\n Very \u2013 that’s almost the ideal input for the model. A long, steady, well-documented climb is exactly where our assumptions are safest, because the effort is sustained and evenly paced and gravity dominates the equation [so reducing impact of aerodynamics \u2013 ed].<\/p>\n We already saw the model’s strength internally: four completely different efforts \u2013 a fatigued Grand Tour climb, a mountain time trial, and a one-day-race ascent \u2014 all converged on essentially the same VO2 max.<\/p>\n A ride like Alpe d’Huez would be another independent test of that convergence. The honest caveat never changes: the estimate is only as good as the inputs I’m forced to assume.\u00a0<\/p>\n That’s exactly it. The physics of a climb we can pin down tightly; the biology is where the uncertainty lives. The two dominant unknowns in the model are his real gross efficiency and how close to his true ceiling he was actually riding \u2013 both are things a genuine power file plus a single lab test would resolve almost completely.<\/p>\n Everything else \u2013 body mass, air density, rolling resistance \u2013 we showed shifts the estimate by less than 2%. So yes: give me his power and an efficiency measurement and the range would collapse to a number I’d defend with far more confidence. <\/p>\n We’ve squeezed the physics as far as it will go. The last real uncertainty is biology that only he and his team can measure.<\/p>\n Do you hope he or his team read it and respond? Will we ever see detailed data? Why are riders and teams so protective of it?<\/p>\n I’d genuinely welcome a response \u2013 including a rebuttal \u2013 because the way you settle this is with data, not opinion. <\/p>\n I’ve seen that a Spanish outlet already carried the reaction from his camp calling our figures exaggerated, and honestly that’s the response you’d expect, and I don’t hold it against them: this data is competitive intelligence and it’s reputationally loaded, so a rider and his staff have every incentive to play it down. But [saying it\u2019s exaggerated] is a communications position, not a scientific counter-argument.<\/p>\n Because here’s what doesn’t move. The power outputs are real, and we validated them against actual power-meter files to within about 3% \u2013 the same margin of error you get from a commercial power meter.<\/p>\n Once the watts are fixed, physics fixes the oxygen cost of the climb, and the only two dials left are efficiency and VO2 max. <\/p>\n We turned both to their most conservative, literature-based settings and the VO2 max still won’t fall below 92.<\/p>\n The only way to make it “normal” is to assume a gross efficiency higher than anyone has ever recorded, which doesn’t make the ride ordinary \u2014 it just relocates the extraordinariness. <\/p>\n And we deliberately stacked the deck against ourselves: we left out his most explosive efforts, used the gentlest altitude correction (a steeper, equally defensible one pushes the [VO2 max] estimate toward 100), and assumed he’s perfectly heat- and altitude-acclimatised and fatigue-resistant. <\/p>\n Relax any of those and the number goes up, not down. You can argue about whether it’s a 94 or a 100 \u2013 you can’t make these rides physiologically ordinary. The watts are real, and the body has to pay for them one way or another.<\/p>\n So do I think we’ll see his lab or training numbers? Probably not voluntarily \u2013 in cycling this information is both tactically and historically sensitive, and silence is the safe default. <\/p>\n But the invitation is open and sincere: release the power files or a lab test and we’ll happily reconcile our model against them. <\/p>\n Being shown to be slightly off by real data would be a perfectly good outcome for science. Being told “it’s exaggerated” without the data that would demonstrate it is not a rebuttal \u2013 it’s the answer their environment almost has to give.<\/p>\n You can follow Sebastian Sitko<\/a> and his study colleagues, Ole Kristian Berg<\/a> and Pedro Valenzuela<\/a>, on X\/Twitter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond never needs to be asked twice to stick the boot into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":844494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-844493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-482042662.jpg\")
Froome’s VO2 max lab test was done at the end of his successful 2015 season. Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-1174642754.jpg\")
A cherubic Poga\u010dar won three Vuelta a Espana stages in 2019 as a 20-year-old on his way to third overall. Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2283856464.jpg\")
Poga\u010dar’s top end zone 2 power was a shock to us amateur riders, who might expect to be able to hold it for several minutes. Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-991057898.jpg\")
Oskar Svendsen’s career fizzled out quickly, but his VO2 max recording has lived on much longer. Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2161395493.jpg\")
Poga\u010dar’s ride on Plateau de Beille in 2024 was one of four climbing performances analysed. Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2162682282.jpg\")
Isola 2000 in 2024, a regular training climb for Poga\u010dar, was another of the studied climbs. Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2287478487-1.jpg\")
Poga\u010dar\u2019s laying waste to the peloton on Alpe d’Huez in July might produce an even bigger number. Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2285440261.jpg\")
Poga\u010dar’s competitive fight is a major part of his arsenal. Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Picture-1.jpg\")
The graph that the authors shared on social media of Poga\u010dar’s Alpe d’Huez 2026 stats, processed through their model.
\nI assume you’d love to get hold of the key data \u2013 power, weight, gross efficiency \u2013 to fill the gaps and see how it affects your estimates?<\/p>\n