After a second straight day of complete domination in the Volta a Catalunya for Tadej Pogačar, post-stage questions are rapidly swivelling from whether he thinks he can win to how many stages he would like to add to his palmares.
Clinching a victory is never that straightforward, obviously, particularly when it comes after 4,000 metres of climbing and a mammoth Pyrenean ascent, in this case the 18-kilometre Port Ainé, to complete it all.
But Pogačar has the champions’ gift of making the complicated look simple, and even if he said afterwards he was tired, the way he briskly despatched one GC attack of the day by Mikel Landa (Soudal-QuickStep) and then remorselessly prised open a 48-second gap on his closest pursuer, could hardly do anything but impress.
Two stages out of two, then, not to mention a very narrow miss at a third out of three on stage 1 behind late breakaway Nick Schultz, have already gone to Pogačar. But when asked afterwards how many Volta stage victories he would like, Pogačar made it clear he’s not stopping at any particular number.
“If you can win, you win and you don’t hesitate,” he said. “All the 175 riders that were on the start here want to win, and if the team works so hard for you all the year round, not just what you see on the TV, then I won’t say they expect you to win, but it’s what they are fighting for too.
“So we try to win as much as we can if we can stay strong as a team together.”
The day itself played out ideally for Pogačar, with the news that after Jay Vine was a DNF on stage 2, another UAE rider, Felix Grosschartner, had gone down with stomach issues, the one new cloud on the team’s radar. In any case, going for a second summit finish victory in as many stages seemed like the natural conclusion to the team’s work throughout the day.
“Our plan was to be as solid as possible as a team. We already lost Jay and Felix has stomach problems as well so we wanted to be strong as a unit. The guys did a great job on the first climbs” - three Pyrenean ascents, two HC and one cat 1 were on the day’s menu - “and going down into the valley, it was pretty simple.”
“Domen [Novak], our Lamborghini tractor, was pulling at a good pace, and it was super easy to the second last climb.
“That’s when Visma-Lease A Bike started to pull and that’s where things got a bit more intense. But for me, it was a pretty nice pace on the whole climb, and today, the weather was better, too. I enjoyed things more.
“I’m just superhappy in the end I had good legs and I could finish off all the hard work of all my teammates in this race.”
Pogačar’s powers of prediction were not strong enough to foresee that Landa would launch an attack at seven kilometres to go, logically enough. But there was no doubt about how much power he had to respond and then drop the veteran Spaniard, who had to settle for second on a second straight day.
“I can’t plan what Mikel does, but I knew he would attack; he looked really good on the climb. Maybe it was a bit too optimistic for me to go straight over the top of him, but in the end, I managed to make a gap and set a good rhythm. It was still quite a long way to the top, though, so I tried to manage my effort. It was a long climb and a hard finish, so I was happy that it was over when it was over.”
Curiously enough, although Pogačar is the first rider to take back-to-back stages in the Volta since retired French sprinter Nacer Bouhanni in 2016, Pogačar is not the first Slovenian to do so. Back in 2014, allrounder Luka Mezgec (Jayco-AIUIa) took two bunch gallops on stages 1 and 2, en route to a total of three victories in the same race.
Whether Pogačar will equal or supersede Mezgec’s total remains to be seen in this year’s race, but he was markedly non-committal about whether, with two stages in the bag, he would now play a more defensive role overall.
“The objective is always the final GC, so there’s still a long way to Barcelona and anything can happen. But now we’ve got two easier days before the final really hard weekend, and we’ll see how the race develops and how the guys feel in the next days.”
That said, when asked after Tuesday’s stage whether Pogačar had already won the overall, though, Landa already said that as the pre-race favourite and having taken so much time, the tide was flowing strongly in the Slovenian’s favour. After Wednesday’s repeat scenario, then, presumably Landa’s response now would be - even more so.
