Few riders in history have made dominance look as effortless as Tadej Pogačar. The four-time Tour de France winner, back-to-back world champion and 10-time Monument victor is arguably the best rider in the history of the sport. The 27-year-old’s record speaks for itself: 108 wins, 45 of them in the last two seasons.
Despite all this success, there has not been a full-length biography of the Slovenian published in English – until now, with the launch of Tadej Pogačar: Unstoppable by Andy McGrath.
Having already published books on late greats Frank Vandenbroucke and Tom Simpson, journalist and writer McGrath faced a new challenge with his latest project: the subject was still alive. “Me and my friends joked after the Vandenbroucke book that my next subject had to be alive,” says McGrath. “But this is quite different. I was writing about the sport’s big superstar, a moving target.”
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There could be no benefit of hindsight with Pogačar – his greatness still unfolding and hard to encapsulate. “Tadej needs to have a calmer, more conservative streak to be a Grand Tour racer,” the biographer reflects, “but he is also a one-day dominator, which makes him really interesting.”
Adam is no stranger, as CW news editor, to working fast to keep up with Pogačar’s winning
Mindful that he was in pursuit of a “moving target”, McGrath had to proceed with haste. “It was one calendar year, almost to the day, from first meeting with an editor at Bloomsbury to finishing the project,” he says. “It was probably the ultimate challenge for me as a writer because I didn’t want to just collage it. I wanted new insights, new stories, and to talk to people, to do it face-to-face.”
Over that year McGrath was writing, his subject won a fourth Il Lombardia; a third Strade Bianche; a second Tour of Flanders and La Flèche Wallonne; a third Liège-Bastogne-Liège; the Critérium du Dauphiné; a fourth Tour de France; a second World Championships; and the European Championships; and, after the book was published, a fifth Il Lombardia. Enough to take up the whole book.
Instead, McGrath dedicates 25 pages to 2025, and about the same to 2024, the year in which Pogačar took the triple crown of Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Worlds. The biography is no blow-by-blow account, nor can it be, with those blows still being struck.
“The nice thing about this book is that you finally get a big-picture view,” McGrath explains. “From being nobody, this tiny kid in Slovenia riding a unicycle, to being the complete cyclist, the superstar.” The 250-page book seeks to explain and show Pogačar’s rise, which was not as inevitable as it may seem now. As much space is devoted to his early years as to his recent glories.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Given the reams of material published about Pogačar – more than 100 articles on Cycling Weekly’s website this year alone – how did McGrath tackle the mammoth research challenge?
“There was a huge element of sifting, like panning for gold,” he says. “I listened to all the press conferences he’d done, from 2020 to the present day, but picked only a handful of the best quotes.”
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“THERE ARE THINGS PEOPLE WON’T TELL YOU. THEY WON’T BETRAY HIS TRUST”
McGrath spoke to primary sources too, including team-mates and former team-mates including Mikkel Bjerg and Matteo Trentin, and mentor Andrej Hauptman. “You’re looking for gold there too – nuggets that will add something different.”
Were his interviewees willing to spill the beans? “There’s kind of an inscrutability. The fact he is Tadej Pogačar, the biggest star in modern sport, means that there are things people won’t tell you on the record. They don’t want to betray his trust. They don’t want to get into trouble.”
Unauthorised biography
The book is not an authorised biography and as such contains no new material from the subject himself. “He didn’t give me any one-on-one time, but he doesn’t do many of those [interviews],” McGrath says. “He doesn’t win all these races by being freely available to journalists. I don’t think it affected Unstoppable. His voice runs through it. As for the broader access level, I think it was pretty good, and it speaks to the positive things people have to say about him.”
One notably absent voice is that of Mauro Gianetti, the boss of UAE Team Emirates. “There’s so much riding on Pogačar, financially, competitively, that there’s no point [from the team’s perspective] in him being super open with the media,” adds McGrath.
The author did travel to Slovenia to meet with many figures from Pogačar’s past and present, a trip which gave him more than just quotes.
“I didn’t have an interpreter, so God bless Slovenians for being so good at English,” McGrath says. “It was January, and Hauptman, the UAE DS, was still there, so it turned out to be a really good time to go and talk to people.”
Pogačar’s stellar palmarès spans Grand Tours and cobbled Classics
(Image credit: Getty Images)
McGrath was also able to get a sense of the landscape and community that made Pogačar. “Going to his hometown gives you a very grounding sense of who he is, the core of him growing up. There’s nothing there to suggest that he would be an outstanding cyclist.”
Pogačar’s winning has come to feel predictable, but the book reminds us of the shock in 2020 when the then 21-year-old stormed to victory at the Tour de France. Just two years earlier, he was on a Slovenian Continental team. “The lack of hype and his nationality worked for him in the long run,” McGrath says. “If Pogačar had been Belgian, there would have been a lot more pressure.”
He recounts the story of a WorldTour team who, initially interested in signing the young rider, changed their mind upon discovering he was Slovenian. “There was definitely snobbery from the heartland nations of Europe,” adds McGrath.
Highs and lows
What gives the book its compelling story isn’t that Pogačar is a serial winner, the unstoppable great of its title, but that he has had to overcome adversity. “With the Tour defeats to [Jonas] Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023, there’s a little bit of revisionism in the book,” McGrath argues.
“You realise just how impressive Visma’s plan and execution was. I think it was probably one of the best days of bike racing since I started watching 22 years ago. We thought Pogačar was invincible, and 2022 showed he wasn’t, and after the 2023 defeat, there was a sense he might not come back from it.”
In light of the past two years, though, the book’s title can only be taken literally. “Unstoppable was decided very early on,” says McGrath, “before the 2025 season. In the back of my mind was, what if he has a terrible year? Would we have a big black mark through the title?”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Thankfully for McGrath, Pogačar’s unstoppability has become undeniable. It has left some arguing that his dominance has become boring – a charge his biographer rejects. “Why is excellence boring? After Pogačar retires, probably in five years’ time, we won’t see someone like that for decades, probably ever.”
The book may soon need an update, given the rate at which the Slovenian wins – a prospect McGrath isn’t ruling out. “I’m not bored by Pogačar. There were always new things to say about him.”
That, ultimately, is the point of Unstoppable: a portrait of an athlete whose story keeps outrunning those who try to capture it. McGrath’s challenge was to fix on the page something still in motion – and in doing so, he’s shown why Pogačar remains the sport’s most compelling moving target.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR POGAČAR?
Having spent more time thinking about Pogačar than most, McGrath is well placed to play Nostradamus with the Slovenian.
“Logically, he’s going to face the biggest hurdle he’s ever faced in the next two years. So far, he has avoided serious crashes. He pushes the limits so much, and that’s another reason why he’s so exciting.
“He said a few times this year that he’s at his peak. How long could he stay there? My hunch is two more years, which would be phenomenal.”
The rider McGrath identifies as Pogačar’s biggest foe might come as a surprise: “I think [Remco] Evenepoel, not Vingegaard, will be the one who could challenge him more in the future, because Red Bull are not in cycling just to finish third in the Tour.”
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 27 November 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
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