Can Tadej Pogačar Win the Triple Crown?

Nobody has won the Tour, the Giro, and the world championship in the same year since 1987. This maniac is adding the Olympics and three monuments on top.

Dec 22, 2023

He’s going to try to do it. That lunatic. That absolute madman. Tadej Pogačar, who’s spent the past four seasons forcing cycling observers to redefine their conception of what’s possible, is going for the Giro-Tour double. Only two male riders in the 21st century have won multiple grand tours in a year. Nobody has won the two most famous in the same year since Marco Pantani in 1998.

But that’s not all. Pogačar is not defending his Tour of Flanders title, but he’s racing three other monuments, plus the Olympics, plus the world championships. Winning the Tour, the Giro, and the world championship road race in the same year is a historic accomplishment—the Triple Crown of Cycling—that’s only been done twice ever, and not since 1987.

Nobody has won all three of those races and the Olympic gold medal in the same year.

So is this it? Is this the next barrier for Pogačar to break? Let’s leave aside Milan-San Remo, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Il Lombardia, and Strade Bianche. We know he can win those races. He’s already won the last three, Il Lombardia three times running. Can he win the Triple Crown, or even Steffi Graf it and add an Olympic gold medal to his collection? Let’s take it race by race.

1) Can Pogačar win the world road race championship?

This is no surprise. Pogačar has had worlds circled on his calendar for a while now. He wasn’t a serious contender for his first four attempts at the rainbow jersey, for various reasons—driving rain, unfavorable parcours, that one time Remco Evenepoel came to Australia and bum-rushed the entire peloton without breaking a sweat. But in 2023, Pogačar went to worlds as a fully-fledged classics contender, and he finished third.

The 2024 championship will be held in Zurich, home of…let’s see some new hands…okay, “banks full of money from morally questionable sources” is technically correct, but the answer we’re looking for his “hills.” This parcours finishes with seven laps of a 27-kilometer circuit that features two short climbs with maximum gradients of 15 percent or more. Pogačar is great in the big mountains, but he wrecks house on courses that require this kind of repeated climbing effort; that’s why he was able to beat all the cobbled specialists at Tour of Flanders.

Here I’ll quote Andrew Hood of Velo, who began his story on the road race world championship course thusly: “Riders like Tadej Pogačar and Demi Vollering will be licking their chops after seeing the first glance of the elite road racing courses on tap for the 2024 road cycling world championships.”

Pogačar thrives on this kind of terrain, and by winning Il Lombardia three times he’s shown he can sustain his form at the end of a long season. He’s gonna have the wettest chops in the entire peloton.

Verdict: Yes

2) Can Pogačar win the Olympic road race?

Maybe. There are 2,800 meters of climbing on this course, which sounds like a lot, but in reality this course isn’t as hilly as the course in Zurich; of its 13 marked climbs, none exceeds 1.9 kilometers in length or 6.5 percent in average gradient. The middle third of the race could be pretty attritional if the pace is high, but the last 60 or so kilometers are relatively flat.

The finale includes three ascents of the Côte de la Butte Montmarre; for those of you who remember Rufus Wainwright’s song on the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack, this is the hill that song is about. (I thought it was about a butt. I don’t really pay attention to song lyrics, even in English.) After the third ascent and descent, the last nine kilometers or so are a flat road to the finish at the Trocadero.

Pogačar has won on courses like this before. He’s won Amstel Gold. He’s finished top five at Milan-San Remo twice. But Wout van Aert is also confirmed to be targeting the Olympics. There is nothing on this parcours van Aert can’t get over, and if he and Pogačar come to the line together, he will fuck Pogačar’s shit up in a heads-up sprint.

At the last Olympics, van Aert and Pogačar came to the line at the head of the second group on the road, after riding a much more demanding course, and van Aert was so unconcerned with Pogačar’s burst he led him out in the sprint for the silver medal, and Pogačar still couldn’t get around van Aert. And van Aert wants this gold medal badly enough he’s skipping the Tour and compromising his classics prep by racing the Giro in order to be at full strength for the Olympics.

We don’t know yet if Mathieu van der Poel will contest the road race, the mountain bike race, or both, but if Pogačar brings him to the line, he’s going to get torched too.

So if Pogačar wins this, he has to drop the pure classics specialists and sprinters first and stay away. That probably means a long-range attack, with van Aert and another big sprinter in the chase group, so the collaboration behind him breaks down. It’s doable, but I think this is the hardest individual race of the group for Pogačar to win.

Verdict: It could happen, but he’d need everything to break right.

3) Can Pogačar win the Giro d’Italia?

Is it a stage race? Yes. Is Jonas Vingegaard going? No. Then yes.

It’s been almost four years since Pogačar started a stage race that was won by anyone but him or Vingegaard. The last time Pogačar finished behind anyone else was the 2021 Tour of the Basque Country, which he finished third behind Vingegaard and Primož Roglič. Even that comes with a caveat, because Pogačar started the last mountain stage behind teammate Brandon McNulty in the standings, so when McNulty cracked, it took UAE a minute to figure out whether Pogačar should leave him behind. The last time Pogačar got out-and-out beat in a stage race by anyone other than Vingegaard was the 2020 Critérium du Dauphiné.

I had some fun imagining how Team Visma-Lease a Bike might win this race, either behind van Aert or, in my wildest dreams, Matteo Jorgenson. Forget it. That’s before I knew Pogačar was racing the Giro.

Verdict: I would be surprised if he didn’t win it.

4) Can Pogačar win the Tour de France?

I think this is where it’s going to fall apart, which might sound surprising, considering that the Tour is the only one of these four races Pogačar has actually won before.

Let’s talk about the Triple Crown of Cycling.

It’s been won twice, by Eddy Merckx in 1974 and Stephen Roche in 1987. It remains to be seen whether the Triple Crown involves winning the Giro, the Tour, and the world road race championship; or if any two grand tours and either the road race or time trial championship would suffice. Both Merckx and Roche went Giro-Tour-road race.

Miguel Indurain was all set to do it in 1993; after winning the Giro and the Tour, he set off on a rain-soaked course in Oslo and came to the last lap as part of the leading group. But on that lap a 21-year-old converted triathlete from Texas named Lance Armstrong rocked off the front of the group and into the distance, and Indurain never saw him again. Armstrong won the rainbow jersey; Big Mig finished second.

Only one rider since Indurain has even completed the first two legs of the Triple Crown: Pantani in 1998. And even he was fortunate to do so. He was an outside favorite for that Tour, but that was the year of the Festina Affair. A soigneur from one of the top teams cot caught trying to cross the Franco-Belgian border with a bag full of steroids, EPO, and needles. Two full teams, including one filled with top contenders, got kicked out of the race; 10 people were convicted of various criminal offenses. By the end of the Tour, about half the riders had quit. (For the full story, I can wholeheartedly recommend Alasdair Fotheringham’s book The End of the Road: The Festina Affair and the Tour that Almost Wrecked Cycling.)

By the time the dust settled, Pantani was one of only a handful of contenders left standing. Not that he himself was some pillar of rectitude; Pantani was to cycling what the 1980s Mets were to baseball. But all his drugs scandals came later. But with the field narrowed down, all it took was one historic bed-shitting stage from Jan Ullrich for Pantani to wear yellow into Paris.

So yeah, it’s basically inconceivable for one rider to win the Tour and Giro in the same year anymore. But why?

Cyclists, like most athletes who make their living on elite cardiovascular performance, peak for big events. They have to build up their stamina gradually over the course of months in order to achieve top form for a couple weeks, after which they start the process all over again. That’s why we know which races the top riders are targeting even though the Tour isn’t for six months; they have to plan these things out that far in advance.

The grand tour calendar runs as follows: the Giro takes up most of May, then there’s a month off, then the Tour takes up most of July, then there’s a month off, and then the Vuelta starts in mid-August. There just isn’t enough time for a rider to recover from one three-week effort in time to undertake another four or five weeks later. And that’s especially true for riders who are contesting the general classification, like Pogačar. A sprinter, a domestique, or a stage hunter doesn’t have to be at his best six days a week for three weeks. A rider with designs on the overall win does.

Just two riders have won multiple grand tours in one season since Pantani. The first was Alberto Contador in 2008, who won the Giro in May and the Vuelta in September and had ample time to recover in between. The second was Chris Froome, who won the Tour and the Vuelta, making him the first rider since Pantani to win adjacent grand tours.

But there have been some near-misses. By all rights Roglič should’ve done the Tour-Vuelta double in 2020; if not for an all-time great time trial by Pogačar he would’ve done it. In 2018, Froome was looking at a potential doping ban early in the season, so he deviated from his plan to attempt to win his fifth Tour de France and went the Giro instead. He won.

Froome got off the hook and raced the Tour as well. There, he was outclassed by teammate Geraint Thomas and ultimately finished third. But he was only 33 seconds behind second-place Tom Dumoulin. If Team Sky hadn’t shifted focus from Froome to Thomas mid-race, he could’ve won that Tour as well. Likewise this past year, when Roglič and Vingegaard each won an early grand tour and went to the Vuelta together. If Sepp Kuss hadn’t bitten off a huge chunk of time in an early breakaway, or if he’d surrendered the lead after the time trial, or if team dynamics had broken differently, either Roglič or Vingegaard could’ve won two grand tours in 2023.

Which brings up UAE’s team selection for the 2024 Tour. For the past three years, UAE has put most of its eggs in the Pogačar basket at the Tour de France. These teams have mostly included domestiques who can either control the pace of the peloton or help in the mountains, with at most one other rider (either McNulty or Adam Yates) who could theoretically step into a leadership role if Pogačar came to grief early in the race.

This year, UAE is sending the works: Yates, Juan Ayuso, and João Almeida, all of them grand tour podium finishers who would be legitimate contenders in their own right if Pogačar were not on the team. I don’t think that has anything to do with matching Visma-LAB’s firepower; I think bringing these riders—particularly Ayuso—is an insurance policy in case Pogačar gets gassed after riding the Giro.

Because for the past two years, Jumbo-Visma has taken it to Pogačar at the Tour. Whether it’s heat, altitude, or the result of conditioning challenges that allowed Pogačar to compete at both the Tour de France and Tour of Flanders, Vingegaard has had Pogačar’s number even when the Slovenian star didn’t have an extra grand tour in his legs.

Vingegaard is the only rider who’s been able to beat Pogačar consistently, but he’s not the only one who could mount a challenge if Pogačar is in any way compromised by his efforts in the Giro. Remco Evenepoel is going to the Tour. Roglič will be back and totally focused on the Tour after changing teams to Bora-Hansgrohe. Ineos Grenadiers will put somebody in the top 10: probably Tom Pidcock, who is selling out to go for GC at the Tour. In short, this is going to be the toughest Tour de France Pogačar has ever contested.

Verdict: If Vingegaard crashes or gets sick or suffers an unexpected calamity, we can talk. Even then, Pogačar will probably still need some help. It’s just too much racing in too short a period of time.

Winning the Triple Crown isn’t just a matter of skill, it takes some luck in terms of scheduling as well. Because the world championship course changes every year, a rider—in this case, Pogačar—would need to win two grand tours in a year in which the world championships are contested on a course he can compete with. He also needs to race for both a trade team and a national team capable of supporting a winning effort.

And that’s just for the traditional Triple Crown. In order to add an Olympic gold medal, a rider needs that lightning bolt to strike twice in the same season.

I think Pogačar is getting out over his skis here. It’d be the shock of a lifetime if he actually won all four of these races. But this is the best chance anyone’s ever had of pulling it off; it might be the first realistic opportunity in all of cycling history.

Pogačar rides for one of the two or three richest and best-resourced trade teams, and thanks in part to his accomplishments the Slovenian national team is a powerhouse as well. He lucked into punchy, non-cobbled courses at both the Olympics and worlds, and he’s better in the classics than any multiple Grand Tour winner in decades.

This is the shot. Maybe the only shot Pogačar or anyone else is going to get for generations. He’d have to be crazy not to try.