Placing Tadej Pogačar's Dominant Giro in Historical Context
The biggest win since...and what does this mean for the Giro-Tour double?
It’s been a bit of a wild week for me, with the apparently unbeatable Phillies on the hottest start in baseball in like 20 years. I was on site for half of their 7-1 homestand. While that was going on the Baltimore Orioles traded Mike Baumann the right-handed pitcher, necessitating an emergency analysis of how his new team, the Seattle Mariners, can turn him into an unstoppable slider-chucking monster. (That should be running on FanGraphs tomorrow about the same time this newsletter posts. In the meantime, please tide yourselves over with this piece on Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase.)
And then there’s the pre-Memorial Day Weekend senioritis that falls over any reasonable American. So as the Giro has wound through its third and final week, the outcome all but decided, I admit my thoughts have drifted to just how the hell I’m going to make good on my promise to cook dinner for more than 20 people on Friday night.1
So in order to squeeze some interest out of the waning days of the Giro, when most of my readership will probably be barbecuing or at the beach or committing acts of petty vandalism against Justice Alito’s house on LBI, I fell back on an old hobby of mine: I made a spreadsheet.
See, the question is no longer whether Tadej Pogačar will win the Giro, but by how much. And secondarily, what does his effort here mean for a potential assault on the Giro-Tour double, or the Giro-Tour-Olympics-World Championship quadruple, or the Giro-Tour-Olympics-Vuelta-Worlds quintuple.
Heading into Friday’s action, the standings read as follows:
Tadej Pogačar, Slovenia, UAE Team Emirates, 67 hours, 17 minutes, 2 seconds
Daniel Martínez, Colombia, Bora-Hansgrohe, +7 minutes, 42 seconds
Geraint Thomas, United Kingdom, Ineos Grenadiers, +8 minutes, 4 seconds
Ben O’Connor, Australia, Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale2, + 9 minutes, 47 seconds
Antonio Tiberi, Italy, Bahrain-Victorious, +10 minutes, 29 seconds
I went back through Pro Cycling Stats for some historical context on that gap, because of late, the Giro has been extremely close. There was the 2020 edition, which famously went into the Stage 21 time trial with Jai Hindley and Tao Geoghegan Hart tied on GC. But the winning margin of this race hasn’t been greater than two minutes since 2014. Since then, five of the nine completed Giros have been decided by 52 seconds or less.
The last Giro that was anywhere near this lopsided was 2011, which Michele Scarponi won by 6 minutes, 56 seconds over second-place Vincenzo Nibali and more than 10 minutes over third-place John Gadret. I suppose it’s possible that Martínez and Thomas’s fight for second place could lead to a move Pogačar doesn’t chase, bringing the total margin of victory back within seven minutes. But I doubt it. Pogačar has proved time and again over the past three weeks that he will attack or chase whenever he has the legs. None of the grim conservatism of Chris Froome’s Sky—Pogačar is motivated as much by shits and giggles as actual victory.
I think the historical comparison to watch is 2006, when Ivan Basso won by 9 minutes and 18 seconds, with roughly another nine minutes separating second from fourth. This was Basso’s last race before the hammer dropped on the Operación Puerto doping investigation, which knocked Basso out of the running for the 2006 Tour de France.
Can Pogačar get to a 10-minute margin of victory? That hasn’t been accomplished at the Giro since 1965. Let’s see.
Pogačar has finished either first or second in the past four non-sprint stages. He’s won five stages overall and finished in the top three others, so I’m not totally going to rule out the possibility of Pogačar putting time into the rest of the top five on Friday. But in all likelihood, the only remaining stage with a serious chance of time gaps is Saturday’s Stage 20, which features a double traverse of Monte Grappa.
This is a proper grand tour beast, at 18.1 kilometers with an average gradient of 8.1%. Last Sunday, Pogačar took almost three minutes out of the other GC contenders in about half of the total climbing he’ll have to work with on Saturday. He only needs to add two minutes and change to his current margin over Martínez to put him double-digit minutes behind.
With the gap already this big, Pogačar could more easily run up the score. Let’s say he attacks and leaves Martínez, Thomas, O’Connor, Tiberi, and the others in his wake. If there’s no chance of a stage win, Martínez shouldn’t—and probably wouldn’t—give two shits about where Pogačar goes. His race is with Thomas, and to a lesser extent O’Connor, for the minor podium places. That could afford Pogačar quite a bit of leeway.
On the other hand, this is Stage 20 in a race Pogačar has already won, and there’s a long descent before the stage finish. These descent finishes are designed to allow riders to pull back losses from the uphill section of the mountain. Neither Martínez nor Thomas is an exceptional bikehandler, but Pogačar is going to have absolutely zero incentive to take risks on the descent.
Pogačar knows two things: 1) A crash is basically the only thing that can cost him the Giro at this point, to say nothing of how an injury could imperil his goals for later this season and 2) nobody is ultimately going to care how much he wins this race by.
So if this were a flat-out, last-gasp, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it one-day race, I have every confidence that Pogačar could take out two or three minutes on his rivals. However, risking a collapse while running up the score on a race that’s already an all-time ass-kicking seems like too much even for him.
That means the next domino for Pogačar is the Tour de France. Those of you who know your cycling history know the last rider to win the Giro and the Tour in the same year was Marco Pantani in 1998. Before him was Miguel Indurain in 1992 and 1993.
I mentioned Basso earlier, but tossing Pantani into the mix underscores the uselessness of going too far into the past for insight. If you grew up in the church—or if you watched Tim Tebow play football in 2008—you know Philippians 4:13, which reads, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
There’s an equivalent proverb in the world of cycling: “I can do all things if I’m on enough EPO to clog up a Manhattan water main.”
Let’s assume that’s not Pogačar. It’d be the biggest bummer of all time if he were on the Johan Bruyneel Workout Plan. In the modern era, the Giro-Tour double has never been completed.
This is where the spreadsheet comes in.
I looked up every Giro podium finisher since 2010 and charted their grand tour performance for the rest of the season.
Three podium spots times 14 races equals 42 finishers, with several riders making more than one appearance.
It’s de rigeur for successful Giro contestants to attempt another grand tour later in the season, but that’s usually the Vuelta. Since 2010, 26 of 42 podium finishers have ridden the Vuelta, while only 12 have raced the Tour. Dating back to 2021, eight of the past nine Giro podium finishers have raced the Vuelta but not the Tour; Simon Yates in 2021 is the only one to do it the other way around.
Given the best part of three months to recover, Giro contenders usually do well at the Vuelta. Of the 26 Giro podium finishers to race that year’s Vuelta, 23 have finished the race, 14 placed in the top 10, nine ended up on the podium and three have won the GC.
Those high finishes don’t account for two outliers I want to highlight: In 2022, Richard Carapaz finished second at the Giro and came back to race the Vuelta. He wasn’t in the GC battle—he ended up in 14th, almost half an hour behind Remco Evenepoel—but he had an all-timer stage hunting outing, winning three stages and the mountains classification.
And in 2016, Alejandro Valverde3 finished in 12th place at the Vuelta after coming in third at the Giro and sixth at the Tour. Valverde came within two minutes of a top 10 at the Vuelta, which would’ve made him the third rider ever—and the first since 1957—to finish in the top 10 in all three grand tours in a single year.
The Tour is far less forgiving. Since 2010, only two Giro podium finishers have even won a stage at that year’s Tour de France. Four of 12 starters finished in the top 10, and only two landed on the podium.
But the outliers make think Pogačar has a shot. The only two Giro podium finishers to podium the Tour in the same year are Chris Froome and Tom Dumoulin, who both did it in 2018. They finished 1-2, respectively, at the Giro and 2-3 behind Thomas at the Tour.
Froome scrambled to race that year’s Giro in order to get one last grand tour in before the verdict on his doping case came down.4 With the extra three weeks of racing in his legs, Froome was legitimately bested at the Tour, really for the only time during his prime.
But Pogačar has a couple things working for him. First, he’s the absolute undisputed leader of UAE. By 2018, Froome was the big dog at Sky, but Thomas had been groomed as his heir presumptive and eventual co-leader. When Thomas turned out to be the stronger rider, Sky pivoted to support him. I cannot fathom a scenario, short of injury or force majeure, where UAE does the same. And if you take Thomas out of the equation, Froome only finished 33 seconds behind Dumoulin.
Second, Froome needed a third-week Hail Mary to win that Giro. He got pushed roughly 100 times harder by Dumoulin and Miguel Ángel López5 than anyone is pushing Pogačar in this Giro. I expect that Pogačar will show up at the Tour much closer to his peak than Froome did.
Writing all this out has led me to realize that Pogačar combines the best parts of Froome’s game and Valverde’s. He’s the indefatigable high-mountain climber and world class time trialist who can take big chunks of time out of his opponents. But he’s also one of the best puncheurs in the world, with the ability to recover rapidly over a demanding and densely populated race calendar.
What’s at stake this weekend for Pogačar is at the same time historically significant—six stage wins at a single Giro, a 10-minute margin of victory—and ultimately meaningless. This race is already won, and the important victories he’s setting up are months in the future.
Chili
At first I didn’t like sticking “Decathlon” at the front of this venerable team name, and I definitely didn’t like giving up the classic white jersey-brown shorts combination. After a few months to sit with it, I still hate the uniforms, but I’ve decided that “Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale” rolls off the tongue in a really pleasant way.
Speaking of Operación Puerto
He was acquitted, so he rode the Tour anyway.
Jesus, the doping cases just will not stop coming.