Tadej Pogačar

Tadej Pogačar (born 21 September 1998), nicknamed "Pogi", is a Slovenian professional cyclist who currently rides for UCI WorldTeam UAE Team Emirates XRG. His victories include four Tours de France (2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025), the 2024 Giro d'Italia, and ten one-day Monuments (Tour of Flanders twice, Liège–Bastogne–Liège three times and Giro di Lombardia five times), as well as the World Championship Road Race twice. Comfortable in time-trialing, one-day classic riding and grand-tour climbing, he has been compared to all-round cyclists such as Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault. He is considered one of the greatest cyclists of all time.

In 2024 he became only the third male cyclist, after Eddy Merckx in 1974 and Stephen Roche in 1987, to achieve the Triple Crown of Cycling, winning the Giro, the Tour, and the World Championships in the same year. He is the only rider in history who took the Triple Crown and two monuments (Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Giro di Lombardia) in the same year. In 2025, he became the first male cyclist to win both the Tour de France and the UCI Road World Championship Road Race in two successive years (2024 and 2025).

Born in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia (and grew up in Klanec), Pogačar was a successful junior rider, winning the 2018 Tour de l'Avenir. Aged 20 in 2019, he became the youngest cyclist to win a UCI World Tour race at the Tour of California, and won three stages of the Vuelta a España en route to an overall third-place finish and the young rider title. In both his 2020 debut at the Tour de France and the following year, he won three stages and the race overall, as well as the mountains and young-rider classifications, becoming the only rider to win these three classifications simultaneously. 2021 also saw Pogačar's first successes in the major Monument one-day races, at the Giro di Lombardia and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Subsequent seasons saw further wins in these, with the Tour of Flanders also added to his palmarès in 2023. Meanwhile, in the Grand Tours, Pogačar had consecutive 2nd-place finishes in the Tour de France to Jonas Vingegaard, with whom his rivalry is considered to be one of the greatest of all time. This run ended in 2024 when he completed the first Giro d'Italia and Tour de France double since 1998, winning 12 stages across both races.

Pogačar has been praised for his attacking riding style, an approach which Pogačar himself has jokingly referred to as a "stupid instinct" during a time when many others have ridden more conservatively to manage energy levels. His aim to be competitive across both the Monuments and Grand Tours has been labelled as a return to "classic" bike racing of the 1960s–1980s, and this success across multiple fronts has led to him being the UCI road racing world No.1 for a record total number of weeks and record number of consecutive weeks.