Is Tadej Pogačar the Best Team in Cycling?
A brief consideration after the Giro d'Italia
Apologies for a slightly tardy publication this week. We’re in the six-day dead period between the Giro and the Dauphiné, and perhaps more to the point: I’m just coming back from a weekend at the Jersey Shore in a state of profound intellectual exhaustion. Eventually you get old and your friends try to muscle through the traditional weekend of drinking, grilling, and party games, even though there are seven children under the age of three in the house. We all swear less and go to bed much earlier these days.
It was a good time for a vacation, because this break comes at one of the fault lines in the road cycling season. Everyone splits the calendar up in their own way, but I tend to view the season as three separate slates:
Spring: Strade Bianche through the end of the Giro (March through May), including most of the classics, the first four monuments, and the Giro
Summer: The Dauphiné through Clásica de San Sebastián (June and July), including the Tour de France, the various warmup stage races, most of the European national championships, and (this year) the Olympics
Last Call is Coming So You Better Go Home With Someone: the Vuelta, the Laurentian classics, Il Lombardia and the fall Italian semi-classics, and the world road race championships. (August through mid-October)
Through the spring, the race win leaderboards for men’s World Tour teams are as follows:
UAE Team Emirates, 38
Lidl-Trek, 231
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, 23
Visma-Lease a Bike, 19
Soudal-Quick Step, 18
EF Education-Easy Post, 15
Alpecin-Deceuninck, 12
Bora-Hansgrohe is the only other team in double digits. Just counting up the wins doesn’t tell the whole story, as I’m about to show. But a quick look at the leaderboard does tell you a lot. UAE obviously has to be thrilled with its haul so far, and not just because of Pogačar smoking everyone at a monument and a grand tour. Brandon McNulty has nearly doubled his career win total with six in the span of about three months, and he could easily have broken into double digits. Pogačar and McNulty are just two of four UAE riders with one-week stage race GC wins at the World Tour or Pro Tour level so far this year. And Our Man Isaac del Toro, 20, and Finn Fisher-Black, 22, have three wins apiece.
Meanwhile UAE’s major rival, Visma-LAB, is down in fourth place after a storming start to the season. But it’s understandable, since Visma’s two best riders—Wout van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard—both had serious crash-related injuries, and the yellow school bus finished the Giro with just four riders. Still better than Ineos, which isn’t on this board at all.
I was looking up these numbers because I was impressed with the work Lidl-Trek had done so far this year, including at the Giro, where Jonathan Milan took two stages and the points classification. That’s on top of a big spring for Mads Pedersen, who has seven wins, including two stage race GC victories.
I was going to write about Milan, whom I adore because he’s the class of one of my favorite rider types: The hybrid sprinter. Someone who can hang in a bunch sprint but who can also climb enough to contend in the classics and work in breakaways for the points classification in stage races. Peter Sagan was once the king of this style of racing, and I’ve found myself drawn to this kind of rider: Wout van Aert,2 Greg van Avermaet, Magnus Cort, and so on.
But in the month of May, Decathlon AG2R came from nowhere to win two stages at the Giro and no fewer than nine races in France at the .Pro and .1 level.
Sucking up victories at second- and third-tier races is an important part of the game for teams that don’t have the budget—like Visma-LAB and UAE—to throw up a competitive team at all the monuments and grand tours. It’s how teams like AG2R and EF are able to collect the points to stay out of the relegation battle. Sprinkling in a couple attention-grabbing Grand Tour stage wins and a competitive GC performance for Ben O’Connor has made this basically a perfect month for AG2R.
But it does mean that win totals themselves can be deceiving. Limited to World Tour races, Decathlon AG2R falls down the pecking order a little.
UAE Team Emirates, 19
Visma-Lease a Bike, 10
Lidl-Trek, 8
Soudal-Quick Step, 8
Alpecin-Deceuninck, 83
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, 6
Bora-Hansgrohe, 5
Ineos Grenadiers, 5
EF has only three World Tour wins this year, equal to two second-tier teams: Israel-Premier Tech and Lotto-Dstny.
And at about this point, I started to grapple with the implications of what Pogačar has done so far. In the Giro alone, between his six individual stage wins and the GC, he has seven World Tour wins. He has another five from the Volta a Catalunya. All told, Pogačar has won 13 races this year, every single one of them at the World Tour level, including a monument and a Grand Tour GC. As impressive as McNulty and the others have been this year, here’s the list of best men’s teams this year if Pogačar counts as his own squad:
Non-Pogačar UAE: 25 wins, 6 World Tour wins
Lidl-Trek: 23 wins, 8 World Tour wins, 3 Grand Tour stages/secondary classifications
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale: 23 wins, 6 World Tour wins, 2 Grand Tour stages
Visma-LAB: 19 wins, 10 World Tour wins, 1 Grand Tour stage
Tadej Pogačar: 13 wins, 13 World Tour wins, 2 Monument/Grand Tour wins, 7 Grand Tour stages/secondary classifications
Alpecin-Deceuninck: 12 wins, 8 World Tour wins, 3 Monument/Grand Tour wins
So just on raw wins, regardless of quality of race, Pogačar is seventh among teams this year. At the World Tour level, he’s no. 1 by daylight. And in the biggest races of the season, Alpecin-Deceuninck is the only team that comes close, even after getting goose-egged at the Giro.
I think it’s fair to poke a few holes in Pogačar’s record this year; by and large, he’s dodged his biggest rivals so far. But he’s won so consistently and by such huge margins, I don’t know how to describe this accounting other than being completely, 100 percent vindicated by the eye test.
Lidl-Trek ranked ahead by virtue of more WorldTour wins
Though he’s so versatile it feels disrespectful to describe him as such
Teams with eight World Tour wins are ranked by most total wins