'It's only won on July 27, not before' - The gameplan behind UAE Team Emirates-XRG's bid to win Tour de France number 4 with Tadej Pogačar

"Pogacar isn't a gamble, he's a sure-fire value. He's a champion," was how Joxean Fernández Matxin once assertively described the current world's number one cyclist and leading Tour de France favourite, Tadej Pogačar, in an interview way back in 2019.

That particular claim by the UAE Team Emirates-XRG head of sport about the squad's leader was made well before the Slovenian had fully (and amply) proven his worth in three-week stage racing and when his dreams of capturing multiple Monuments or the rainbow jersey were still only just that – dreams.

But a lot of water has since gone under the bridge, and we've now reached the point where Pogačar's status as top favourite for a fourth Tour de France this year is such that it almost feels like all the UAE Team Emirates leader has to do is turn up in Lille on July 5 and he'll have won it already. These days the man, as Matxin put it so presciently six years ago, is anything but a gamble.

Even Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), Pogačar's arch-rival for Tour glory since 2021 (and whose last Tour victory, it's worth remembering amidst all the Pogi-worship, was only two years ago) has tipped Pogačar as the rider most likely to be in yellow on July 27 in Paris. Yet amidst all that near-general consensus, it's striking how Matxin, the man at the heart of the UAE engine room behind Pogačar since 2019, may not talk about gambles any more, but he continues to insist that things aren't nearly as safe a bet as a quick glance at the results sheets, from the 2025 Dauphiné all the way back to last year's Tour and beyond, would suggest.

"It's not a question of being cautious, it's a question of realism," Matxin tells Cyclingnews two weeks out from the Tour. "You have to be realistic."

"Everything you've done up to now is good for measuring your own strength and measuring yourself against your rivals. But at the end of the day, we all know that the Tour is the Tour.

"The race starts on July 5, not at the beginning of June, and it's only won on July 27, not before. You could say that's that's even more the case this time round, when on the very last day of the Tour, there's a stage that's anything but straightforward."

After more than 30 years in the business, then, Matxin seemingly remains very aware that things can change at the drop of a hat in cycling, and even more so when the tide seems set remorselessly in one rider's favour – as it does now with Tadej Pogačar. The history books confirm that too: you certainly don't have to go so far back as Miguel Indurain in 1996, say, who had five straight Tour de France wins to his name when he won the Dauphiné hands-down that June, but who then collapsed spectacularly in the Tour, finishing eleventh.

Or as Matxin puts it: "When you get ahead like Tadej, you try to stay ahead. But when you have a top-level objective, be it individual or collective, you quickly realise the hardest thing isn't to win. The hardest thing is staying up there."

Keep your distance

Maintaining enough of a winning margin to be sure of staying ahead in the game, in other words, is what Matxin sees as the biggest challenge. And for some fans, given the way that the Vingegaard-Pogačar rivalry has now endured for such an unprecedentedly long period of time that simply means beating the Dane.

That point of view is helped by the fact that historically no other two riders have ever occupied the top two spots of the Tour's final podium for so many consecutive editions, albeit swapping around first and second. But according to that mathematical logic, if nothing else, means that if Pogačar loses, then Vingegaard automatically wins, and vice versa.

Yet more 'evidence' for that perhaps reductionist take is that globally and time-wise – save for last year's knock-out edition in favour of Pogačar – the rivalry between Pogačar and Vingegaard has been too close to call. In the four editions since the start of the 2021 race and their first 1-2 result in Paris, if you remove the bonus seconds, and add up the total time used by each, overall it comes out in favour of Vingegaard by three seconds.

However, Matxin not only rejects that particular piece of data as irrelevant. He also opens up the rivalry faced by Pogačar to far more names than just Vingegaard. A certain Belgian world time trial champion who finished third in the Tour last year is at the top of the list, but it goes way beyond that.

"The time they each took is not important, because what matters is if you've won the Tour or if you've lost it. And right now, it's 3-2 in favour of Tadej," he said.

"But in any case, if you take the case of a rider like [Isaac] Del Toro in the Giro d'Italia. In terms of Grand Tours, he came out of nowhere, and look how close he got to winning the Giro. So you have to remember how many other, new riders could suddenly be in the mix as well. There's Remco [Evenepoel] but he's not the only rider on the rise. But why can't others be too?

"Like I said, you have to be realistic. You have realise that just as Tadej or Vingegaard suddenly came on the scene in the way Tadej did back in the day" - a reference to Pogačar's last-minute surprise victory against Primož Roglič in 2020 - "so can somebody else. You just can't sleep on your laurels."

A straight duel

Yet for all Matxin's words of warning about how the race could be impacted dramatically by new names, not just the familiar ones, he obviously doesn't ignore the fact that Vingegaard and Pogačar have been sharing the top of the classification for the last four years, either. Interestingly, too, for all that neither has proved able to get the better of the other in a definitive manner, Matxin believes that 2025 will mark a new phase, given the events of 2023 and 2024.

"The last two Tours have been impacted by the falls the two of them had before the race," he points out – Pogačar in 2023, breaking his wrist in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Vingegaard in 2024 in Itzulia Basque Country, suffering multiple, more serious fractures.

"So now they're facing up to each other again, and that's maybe the most important element of the race. Neither of them has had any setbacks like that this year, so it's a straight duel this time round."

The absence of 'what-ifs' or 'yes, buts' to cloud the argument will not only make for a more level playing field. It also ensures that the gloves will be off from the word go, Matxin points out. Neither rider, knowing their rival is in top condition, will want to give them the least opportunity to gain the slightest advantage.

"And goodness knows there are enough nervous first-week stages for them to do battle in;" he adds, before ticking them off. "Stage 2 to Boulogne: very nervous; the one to Dunkerque [stage 3]: I don't even want to think about; the one to Rouen: nervous; the one to Normandie [stage 6]: also nervous; the stage to the Mur de Bretagne [stage 7]: also nervous... If you take away the first time trial, there are nine stages where the tension is going to be perpetually at boiling point."

Rather than the usual armed truce in the opening phases of the Tour, then, this extended battle has already stretched back into the Dauphiné and erupted between the team domestiques, let alone the main actors. As Fred Wright (Bahrain Victorious) pointed out, there were points in the Dauphiné's first transition stages – and this even in the flatter moments or downhills where there was no conceivable advantage to them doing so – where UAE and Visma were already fighting each other to be in control. The underlying reason being: the stakes have got so high now, any excuse for a battle is a good one.

To go back to Indurain, though, the five-times Tour winner always used to say that rather than rivals, the one person he was truly scared of was himself: would he be up to scratch, able to meet all the challenges? Viewed in that optic, Pogačar's most immediate challenges could be seen as time trialling – the one point in which not only Vingegaard, but also Remco Evenepoel and even Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike) outpowered him in the Dauphiné – and whether, given Vingegaard's emphasis on endurance as his strong point, he'll still be on top of the game come the third week.

Regarding the time trialling, the way the Slovenian looked over Vingegaard's bike at the finish of the Dauphiné's TT stage, after losing nearly 30 seconds in 17.4 kilometres to the Dane, said far more than anything he could have told the media about his defeat – which in any case, he didn't, refusing to comment to the press at all. Rather like the Le Lioran stage of the Tour last year, where it briefly looked as if Vingegaard had finally drawn equal with Pogačar, for a while the Dauphiné TT felt like it could have been a turning point, a moment when the balance tipped back in favour of the Dane.

As we all now know, that proved to be a pipe-dream, both in the Tour last year and again in the Dauphiné this June. In both cases, Pogačar was subsequently able to inflict stinging defeats on his arch-rival in the mountains. But the time trial nonetheless remains a question mark about Pogačar's performance that UAE need to answer, particularly as if the times are extrapolated from 17 kilometres in the Dauphiné TT to the 33 on the equivalent stage 5 of the Tour, Pogačar could find himself lagging behind Vingegaard and Evenepoel and forced to attack in the mountains.

"The Dauphine TT was probably something to do with how he gauged his efforts, I'm pretty clear about that," Matxin said by way of explanation. "Plus it all happened when he wasn't having a superlative day, either.

"Tadej isn't always superlative and unfortunately, it seems like when he doesn't have that kind of excellence, for a lot of people, suddenly it's like he had a really bad day. But at the same time, you can't underestimate the rivals, either: they know how to race well and that's what they did on that particular stage."

There are other points in the 2025 Tour route where the Vingegaard-Pogačar rivalry will be raking over even older coals in their rivalry. There's the Hautacam on stage 11, for example, where Vingegaard placed the definitive nail in the Slovenian's GC coffin in the 2022 Tour, and the Ventoux, where Vingegaard briefly dropped Pogačar in the 2021 edition, but could not dislodge him from the top spot overall. The most emotionally charged trip down memory lane, though, will surely be the Col de la Loze, where in 2023 Pogačar's radio message, "I'm dead, I'm gone", made it clear that the Dane had swept away all obstacles to a second straight overall win and Pogačar was doomed to a second place overall.

'Not a champion, a leader'

So will Pogačar be inspired or daunted by those memories? Neither, says Matxin.

"We can't live off the past, to be frank, neither for better or for worse. So I don't think what happened two or three years ago has anything to do with what could happen now. They're just circumstantial, particularly when the race does things like, for example, going over the Col du Glandon this time round before it goes up the Loze."

"It's not a question of what you've got to face and what happened there in the past. It's a question of whether you've got the physical capacity to handle it now."

Come what may in the Tour, what hasn't changed is Pogačar's delight in racing. As Matxin confirms, for whether the Slovenian is on victory number 99 or 199, his innate desire to go on punishing his rivals shows no sign of abating at all.

"It's part of his winning DNA," Matxin argues. "He's got a very strong personality and he's not a champion, he's a leader."

"Because if a champion wins, he does it for himself, whereas when a leader wins, he's concerned about his teammates. And that's Tadej, he's always worried about the whole team, no matter the result."

"That attitude pays dividends as well. When riders of the class of [João] Almeida, Tim Wellens, Pavel Sivakov and Jhonatan Narvaéz are willing to bury themselves for him, riders who are at WorldClass level, it's because he's capable of recognising their hard work."

"Then if you look at the results he's taken in the Tour – first, first, second, second, first – there's evidently a reason to fight for a rider like that, a reason why he keeps people onside, because you know what he can give you.

"That level of consistent success, or near-success, really inspires everybody: the staff, the riders, and the whole team. And Tadej appreciates that."

Sharing the mutual benefits of success, but not taking anything for granted does sound like a surefire way of keeping the troops on board and keen to fight. But as Matxin says, another huge point of motivation for Pogačar, of course, is that he is defending a title in 2025.

"Fighting with number one on your back always does give you an extra level of inspiration, no matter the race. It's the same as when you lose, you try to feed off that sense of anger or unfinished business and defeat to try to push back.

"This time, it's the opposite way round for Tadej, he's got that motivation as defending champion – but you have to look for the positive side of things, either way.

"So that's his extra reason to be motivated to try and do things as well as possible. But you have to remember too, that you don't always win."

It's true that in the 2025 Tour Pogačar will be facing rivals as formidable as Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel and whoever else is in the mix. And quite apart from the young, unpredictable Del Toro-esque elements we don't know about, is it really that wise to rule out a five-time Grand Tour winner like Primož Roglič from the running, for example?

Yet at the same time, such is the scale of Pogačar's success across, with those 99 wins and counting in all manner of races from Monuments to Grand Tours, that parts of his fight are now completely invisible. Day by day, race by race, Pogačar is crossing swords, albeit silently and unintentionally, with the biggest ever names in the sport itself.

Just in terms of the Tour, Pogačar's aim of victory would, if achieved, see him leave behind three-time winners Louison Bobet, Greg LeMond and Philippe Thys, and join Chris Froome as one of just five riders with four Tour victories or more in their palmares. Furthermore, when Pogačar won his third Tour de France last July at 26, at the same age Froome – the most recent rider to take four – was still two years off getting his first. As for Indurain, the most recent to take five Tours, he did not win a single edition until he was 27.

So UAE's main message prior to this year's Tour is to warn against any creeping complacency, and the scale of the opposition and the Tour route itself certainly provide ample reasons for them and their star rider to remain as razor-sharp focused as ever.

But for all Matxin's realism – or caution – it's also true that Pogačar is starting both the immediate, short-term Tour de France battle in pole position. It's also true that in the cycling history game, regardless of what happens this summer, Pogačar is already miles ahead of his rivals. And no matter what happens between Lille and Paris this summer, that's one race he won't be losing soon.

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