'Tadej keeps on surprising us' – The inside view on how UAE Team Emirates-XRG have constructed Tadej Pogačar's assault on a fifth Tour de France

Most of the time when we see Tadej Pogačar in a bike race, he's already at the peak of his powers. The only questions that need to be asked are not so much whether he will win, but how and where.

The Tour de France is the hardest of all those racing challenges, though, and taking a fifth one this year would further cement the Slovenian star's place amongst the very greatest of the sport. However, while he is the maximum favourite for the final victory, it's by no means a given that he'll do it.

All of which makes the process by which Pogačar has reached a point where he can bid for the Tour for a seventh year running (and with podium finishes on all of them so far) even more relevant.

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In the first of a two-part series, Cyclingnews talks to UAE Team Emirates-XRG Head of Performance Jeroen Swart about Pogačar and what he believes he can achieve in the Tour de France this year, including why he thinks the four-times winner can still get even better.

Q&A with UAE Team Emirates-XRG's Head of Performance

Cyclingnews (CN): At the start of this season, while you pointed out that two years ago [from the start of 2024 onwards], Pogačar had mproved dramatically, you said, and I'm quoting you textually "I think the changes now will be much smaller. It's more about being able to sustain that level."

Do you stand by that statement now, having seen what he did in the spring and where he's at?

Jeroen Swart (JS): I do. If we look at Tadej's numbers, he definitely is not improving by the same margins as he did before. I have been a little surprised in that we've been able to still eke out some improvement. If you had asked me two years ago, I would have suspected that we would have hit a plateau and that we would have been then focused on maintaining that plateau and to our surprise, he has still improved, and that has helped us as well in terms of his performance on the Classics side as well. That was also aimed at specifically that he'd gained a few kilos of extra muscle that helped with the explosiveness required for the Classics, so there was a focused training and specific adaptation for that.

But his overall performance, if we look across races, has increased very marginally, and we were nevertheless surprised to still see an improvement, which is obviously welcome. Every little bit helps.

CN: So is it fair to say that the best Tadej could be yet to come?

JS: That would be so difficult to predict. I would settle for the same Tadej we've had in previous Tours, that would be great. If he manages to improve further, that would certainly be welcome. I would hesitate to think that it's still possible, but let's wait and see.

CN: But you're not ruling it out.

JS: I'm not ruling anything out. He keeps surprising us and with his level, every year has been a surprise in terms of his ability to continue to improve a little bit here and there. So I wouldn't rule it out, but I think the chances are increasingly slimmer each season that he can take another step.

CN: Miguel Indurain was the last male rider to win five Tours, and he won his first when he was 27, which is the same year that Pogačar could win his fifth this July.

So given the five-year difference in ages to possibly reach that particular landmark, is it fair to say what really matters more now at this point in Tadej career is ensuring his mental resilience remains in place, because you've got the physical side of things more or less dialled?

JS: I think that point about mental resilience isn't just about Tadej, it's across the board, in all sports. Sports psychology and mental coaching have become increasingly recognised as a very important part of sports performance, and whether it's in professional golfing or professional cycling, it's equally as important.

So that means that there's a greater structure and focus than ever before on mental health, performance-related optimisation from a mental perspective. And we've taken specific steps to do that, and to look after that.

The racing has definitely become mentally more challenging, too. It is more full on from the start, and it doesn't really let up, you know: There are the odd races or stages where there's a hiatus in the sort of attacks and the pace and the peloton can relax a little, but that has become almost the exception and no longer the rule. So every race is mentally very taxing and that can be cumulative.

I also think there's a greater mental stress because of the speeds, the aggression in the racing - and our riders talk about this - the risks being taken across the peloton, including by our riders as well, because everybody seems to be pushing the envelope.

Descents have become a step to the next attack, they've become the area where attacks often happen, where the pressure is exerted. So all round, the mental stress of racing has definitely increased substantially.

At the same time, the younger peloton has emerged as a result of riders developing physically much earlier, particularly in their late teens and early twenties, a time when many of them are developing as individuals and their personality is not even fully formed. The prefrontal cortex is still developing, and you're putting these athletes into the most difficult circumstances mentally while they're still developing emotionally and neurologically.

The reason why you've asked the question is because it's obviously a factor these days and we recognise that and so it's something that you have to pay attention to and look after them.

The question is often asked, too, 'When will Tadej stop racing?' and it will be earlier than other athletes have traditionally done in the past. Athletes used to ride into their mid-30s, sometimes in the case of Alejandro Valverde and others into their 40s.

I think it's unlikely that we'll see that. I think we'll see earlier retirements, and then there's also the aspect of motivation for us with Tadej. We've spoken about it quite regularly, and it's important for him to stay motivated and enjoy the sport because as soon as it becomes a drag, it becomes harder to have the level of commitment that you have to have to achieve the heights that he is achieving.

CN: So does that added mental stress for everybody, not just Tadej, but obviously including him, affect the way you've approached the assault on the fifth Tour win?

JS: Well, it's not just around the Tour, it's around the entire season and actually with the whole team. So one of the things that we did do in recent years is that, and I'm talking from a team-wide basis, was introduce our Gen Z team into 1.1, 2.1 races, where we are able to substitute in Gen Z riders and allow our WorldTour riders to take more time out, because we do know and recognise that they require periods of recovery and a large part of that is mental. So we build that into each rider's calendar and [UAE sports manager] Joxean Fernández Matxin does an excellent job of that.

He has found an absolutely phenomenal balance in terms of bringing riders both opportunities but also the periods of recovery that they need and so every rider has a break in the season where they're able to just go home where they reset mentally and physically, and that helps in terms of then returning with increased mental vigour and focus.

In Tadej's case specifically, it's the same thing but also focused around maintaining his motivation while also not overloading him in terms of the racing calendar, and so you'll see his racing calendar is very much focused around his ambitions and goals, and further to that, it's not peppered with races that aren't meaningful. So it's a very carefully constructed calendar that ensures that he is able to tackle the goals that he wants to tackle while also being prepared physically and mentally for the goals coming up.

CN: This year, it's a similar kind of Tour route to 2024, as in we've got a very complicated first week, and then again in the third. How does that change things in terms of the physiological and preparation side? Are you taking a similar approach to 2024, perhaps, when we had the Alps so soon?

JS: The approach is actually very similar, but I don't think the specific parcours of this year's Tour is a reason to change how we do things. In the years when he did the Giro, it was obviously different, but in the years that he hasn't done the Giro and that's the majority of the last few years, the build-up has been very similar to this one: a focus on the Classics, a reset and then a build-up towards the Tour, which requires a different physiological stressor [physical or biological factors that disrupt the body's internal balance - Ed] in terms of the training stimulus. It requires a different set of performance characteristics and so it's aimed at achieving those. It doesn't matter whether the first week is peppered with difficult stages or whether that's in the second week, he needs to arrive at the Tour in top condition, and so that is really what our focus is on.

CN: When it comes to general preparation of the UAE athletes and Tadej in particular, have you looked at other sports outside cycling a lot, a little or just a bit, as a reference point? Are there any specific ones that you have found helpful?

JS: I wouldn't say so. We look at all the science and the evolution of sports performance across the board. So sometimes there are, you know, little anecdotes that come through from running, from other sports that we then look into, and sometimes innovation happens in other sports, and then we will assess that. And then over time it will become part of our practice.

But it's not that often that you see other sports demonstrating new techniques. I would say the ones that we have gained insights from would be, for instance, running and triathlon.

CN: Could you give me an example?

JS: Sure. In running and in triathlon, we've increasingly used heat training in previous years, [also] the aerodynamic side. Triathlon is unlimited. There are no restrictions on the kinds of aerodynamic changes that you can adopt on the bike and in terms of the rider's position, and so triathlon often innovates in that space.

We're then constrained by the UCI regulations. So we have to look at changes that are adopted in triathlon and see whether or not a modification of those can be somehow implemented within the UCI's rules. So that's an example.

Aero gains is a huge part of triathlon, too, and then in the training side of things, as I said, heat training is an example that was adopted across multiple different endurance sports and then running in particular. Then it was adopted by cycling and triathlon and all endurance disciplines collectively.

CN: Have you continued working on his sprints in high mountains because this is something you mentioned in previous interviews as being very important?

JS: It's part of our altitude training protocol for different reasons. Doing sprints at altitude reverses some of the negative effects of being at altitude, which is that blood vessels constrict and therefore limit your ability to do high-intensity accelerations at altitude.

I know that other teams, Jumbo as they were back then [Visma-Lease a Bike], were doing that prior to us, and so sometimes we look at some of the things that other teams are doing while we're studying the literature and we met with the scientists in that space to optimise our protocol and implementation of that protocol.

So that's something that we definitely do, and continue to do, and it's certainly beneficial.

CN: What about his low-cadence torque training, which has also been mentioned as significant?

JS: That's something that's continued too, and I think some of his improvements in the last seasons are still attributable to improvements in torque. In cycling we talk about mean maximum power, which is the mean value for a particular duration that you can produce a power output and we have mean maximal torque as well.

So we know that an athlete can sustain a maximal torque for say five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes and it declines with increasing duration. And Tadej's mean maximum torque values have continued to increase over the last three years that we've been focused on that kind of work.

And because torque is a component of power that is possibly responsible for some of the gains that we've made, we can infer that there are continued improvements in that area as well.

CN: When it comes to Pogačar's use of standing and seated accelerations, I couldn't help noticing during Liège that as far as I could see from the TV cameras, he used a very strong standing acceleration on the Côte de la Redoute and then a seated one on the Roche-aux-Faucons to finally 'get rid of' Paul Seixas. Was that a planned strategy or was that switching around simply because Tadej felt like it?

JS: That was his own decision, that was purely his own decision to attack in that way.

Part of that race he was assessing where he could potentially uncover a weakness in Seixas' ability and it seemed that the out-of-the-saddle, very high intensity attacks were not having the desired effect of shaking him loose. So then he decided to do a very high-intensity effort but sustained for a longer duration, and that's something that you can only do in the saddle and that then had the desired effect of creating the gap.

So I think it was just a matter of testing out the different aspects of where he could exploit a weakness. And eventually he found it.

Part 2 of this interview, including more information on Pogačar's capacities as a racer and rider, will be published next week.

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