July showed us fatigue, maybe even disillusionment. September will show us if the joy has returned.
Tadej Pogačar is back in public this week, which usually means he is back to reshaping the conversation. After a quiet August, spent being a cycling fan and training at home, he is reappearing for the Grands Prix of Québec and Montréal, and then he will head straight to Rwanda for the World Championships. The Canadian one-days are the warm-up; Kigali is the show.
The story isn’t simply that he’s racing again. It’s the question of what version of Pogačar is showing up. At the Tour he looked drained, bored, fatigued – and a little irritated by questions about that fatigue.
“Of course, you’re tired after three weeks of racing at the highest level,” he said this week, as if surprised by the fuss. But his body language told a different story. The surplus of energy that usually defines him bled away in July. He looked like a rider going through the motions, or maybe a champion without an adversary. We wondered aloud if that kind of flatness hinted at something deeper — is this what burnout looks like?
That was probably too much. Pogačar is right, the Tour makes everyone tired. Our expectations of him and his attitude are shaped by years in which he seemed to be the exception that proved that rule.
That’s what makes Quebec so intriguing. In the pre-race press conference, he was smiling again, joking, relaxed. He talked about following Urška Žigart to her races, about training at home in Monaco, about not worrying that he missed a late-summer block of altitude work utilized by many of his rivals. “I feel good. I’m quite happy with how my summer went,” he said. It sounded like a reset, the kind that only time away from the sport, or at least the limelight, can deliver.
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