California dream for Tadej Pogačar
Slovenians are hot property in cycling right now. So are young riders. Strong riders are always in fashion. And right in the overlap in this three-field venn diagram sits Tadej Pogacčar, whose victory in the Tour of California was the latest major race win in 2019 by a rider in his early 20s. Egan Bernal won ParisNice at 22, Mathieu van der Poel won Amstel Gold at 24 (but as a relative road novice). Pogačcar is younger than both – he’s not 21 until September.
Pogačcar might not have been the strongest climber in the Tour of California – EF Education First’s Sergio Higuita (age: 21) looked perkier on the decisive climb of Mount Baldy. But Pogacčar’s timing was better, and he was both more patient than the Colombian and more mindful of the sharp final hairpin bend, 100 metres before the finishing line. Higuita made a stinging attack with 3km to go, which dropped Pogacčar, but it was a physically expensive move, especially given the altitude of the climb, and while Pogacčar, George Bennett and Richie Porte ground their way up at a steady rate, Higuita distanced them, then came slowly back to Pogačcar as his efforts told. The Slovenian then sat on the Colombian’s wheel through the final short switchbacks. Higuita went in to the final turn a little too hot and had to brake, and all Pogacčar had to do was cut the corner a little more sharply – he was now going faster than Higuita, and covering a shorter distance, which put him in front. The stage win put him into yellow, and though he was put under pressure by Deceuninck’s Kasper Asgreen (age: 24) on the short and hilly last stage to Pasadena, he didn’t
panic. There were enough motivated sprinters in the race to shut down escapes, and the Slovenian won his first WorldTour stage race.
The Tour of California is a relatively straightforward event. The wide carriageways, gentle curves and uniform surfaces of American roads, along with the relatively benign climate of the Pacific coast in May, strip out a lot of the complexities that exist in European races. It can take 10 or 20km to get to a good spot in the front of the bunch in a Belgian race, because there’s no space to move up. In California, the roads are wide enough to take 15 or more riders – if the peloton in a Belgian classic resembles a fast-moving river, with churning and swirling water, the California peloton is more like a slow-moving, wide estuary. This doesn’t eliminate tactics, it just changes them. Timing is more the issue – if the peloton is cruising along, a rider can move from back to front in a matter of a minute of less. If the peloton is strung out, it becomes a really drawn-out and costly effort.
But while the California route planners couldn’t make the race technically difficult, they could make it physically hard. Stage 1 was the only flat day, and it went to Peter Sagan. However, the GC was already shaped by the next day, which climbed from sea level to South Lake Tahoe, touching 2,600m at Carson Pass along the way. The steady grind up to high altitude was likened by Mark Cavendish to spending several hours on a turbo trainer, and the attritional structure of the stage meant that the final rolling 30km, which wouldn’t have split the peloton at sea level, became an all-out war, as EF Education First, broke the race up. They managed to drop several dangerous rivals, including Bennett and Porte, and though Asgreen won the stage in a draggy sprint above South Lake Tahoe, EF’s Van Garderen went into yellow. Pogačcar had also made the front group – he ceded 10 seconds in the final surge to the line, but at this point, Van Garderen, a former winner of the event and kickstarting his career with his new team, looked like the favourite.
EF rode as if Van Garderen was the favourite. They helped pick and choose the destiny of the stage wins – one long-range attack in which Deceuninck’s Rémi Cavagna won, and two sprints, taken by Cavagna’s team-mate Fabio Jakobsen and Bahrain’s Iván García. They even switched seamlessly to plan B when Van Garderen cracked on Baldy, leaving Higuita to take over the reins of leadership for his eventual second place. The team were left to rue the closeness of the final result, and another miss at their home race.
In the last 12 editions of the Tour of California, they have finished second six times, third three times and fourth twice, without having won. That Tadej Pogačcar has showed up, age 20, and won at his first attempt can’t have made those statistics any easier for EF to digest.
The wide carriageways, gentle curves and uniform surfaces of American roads strip out a lot of the complexities of European races