The Hipster Favorite

On the varying effort levels in a final-stage time trial, and the historical significance of Primož Roglič

Photo Credit: Unipublic/Sprint Cycling Agency

Don’t worry, the Vuelta doesn’t issue children as podium prizes; these guys brought their own.

It’s always funny to see the variation in give-a-shit in the last stage of a ground tour—especially an individual time trial. After three weeks of racing, the survivors have made it through some 3,300 kilometers horizontally and climbed 59 kilometers vertically. Nineteen riders finished both the Tour de France and the Vuelta this year; in those two races, they rode a distance greater than that between Boston, Massachusetts, and St. Petersburg, Russia. And they climbed more than the height of the Kármán Line, the legally accepted boundary of outer space.

Stage 21 of the Vuelta was 24.6 kilometers in length, with only 190 meters of climbing—roughly half an hour’s work for a World Tour pro. Less, if you’re an elite time trialist with something to prove.

Of which there were vanishingly few by the end of this race.

Stefan Küng set the best overall time at 26 minutes, 28 seconds and brought home—somehow—his first individual stage win at a grand tour. Küng has lived a sort of miniature Wout van Aert tragedy as a time trialist and classics rider, only where van Aert finishes second and third all the time, Küng finishes fifth or sixth. Even one stage win here would represent a definitive win for the six-time Swiss national champion.

The GC riders were, by this point, mostly spread out enough to make the time trial academic. Mattias Skjelmose blitzed it to take eighth on the stage and fifth on GC. But the man he passed, David Gaudu, was one of the weakest time trialists in the race and would’ve known his 30-second cushion wouldn’t be enough. No other top-10 placing changed hands, and nobody cares about the GC results any further down than that.

For everyone else, this stage was about staying upright and within the time cut. Anything beyond that is trivial. Brandon McNulty won the Stage 1 time trial, arguably checking every box he had for this race within his first 13 minutes of competitive racing: A stage win, and a day in the leader’s red jersey. Since then, he’s been bloodied and chastened by a crash from the breakaway, and though he’d have been a match for Küng at full fitness, he rolled into the finish in 113th place out of 135, nearly four minutes down.

Primož Roglič ought to have been similarly lackadaisical. He’d already completed the long-awaited overtake on Ben O’Connor by winning Stage 19 two days before. He came to the start line with a lead of two minutes on the Australian, who is not a spectacular time trialist. There was no need to push.

And yet, Roglič still rode as hard as he could, coming second on the stage and putting more than 30 seconds into O’Connor and Skjelmose, and at least twice that into everyone else in the GC hunt.

It bears mentioning: O’Connor rode a hell of a time trial to retain second place on GC. It was well-deserved after his early breakaway win and two-week defense of the red jersey animated the race—a defense he frequently had to mount solo. It’s a huge moral victory for a rider who had previously finished fourth at two different grand tours but had struggled to better that result. To say nothing of O’Connor completing the trilogy—he now has stage wins at all three grand tours—in his final major race for Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale before his transfer to Jayco-Alula over the winter.

O’Connor might have gotten his podium in unexpected fashion, in a race that did not have the three most dangerous stage racers in the world—Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel. And he might not have been able to hold off Roglič. But he did keep Enric Mas and Richard Carapaz—two of the best of the rest—behind him all the way to Madrid.

And who knows what would’ve happened if not for Roglič?

I come to cycling not as a devout adherent of the sport, but as an American sports columnist. I don’t know if an Americanized sports audience is smarter or dumber than a European one on the whole—European sports fans can be incurious, pretentious, and partisan to the point of delusion—but the definitive national quality of American professional sports culture, to me, is its stark pitilessness.

I don’t think most people believe that the only thing that matters is winning. But that’s what’s easy to package, so the media creates it, the audience consumes it, internalizes it, and asks for more.

An all-or-nothing approach is reductive at best.¹ In the context of a team sport, whose championship is decided in a tournament format, it invites analysis that’s ahistorical far more frequently than illuminating. Tom Brady’s legacy is burnished by a Super Bowl victory in which he throws for 145 yards, but tarnished by a Super Bowl defeat in which he throws for 505 yards. LeBron James is denigrated for making it to the NBA Finals and losing, while Michael Jordan is celebrated for getting knocked out in earlier rounds.

When the empirical evidence doesn’t support the facts, metaphysical evidence is conjured to fill the gaps. This team didn’t want it badly enough. They choked. A team that wins an unlikely victory isn’t lucky, it’s blessed with an ineffable quality of winnerism. In sports, all victories are moral ones. Anything that’s otherwise inexplicable is God’s will, as if we’re not fans of football or baseball but Calvinist fundamentalists from the 18th century.

I bring this up because I’m going to get a little American about Roglič.

This victory at the Vuelta is his fourth, tying Roberto Heras for the most all-time. He’s now won five grand tour titles, which is second among active riders to Chris Froome.² He’s podiumed three other grand tours and won 22 individual stages, second behind Pogačar among active riders.³ He’s tied for eighth all-time in grand tour wins and 29th all-time in stage wins.

I actually have no idea if there’s an official Cycling Hall of Fame, which eliminates some of the Legacy talk you’d ordinarily find around an equivalent athlete in an American sport. Nevertheless, let’s talk about Roglič’s place among the greats.

The 41 Most Interesting Riders in Cycling, Part 4

Objectively, he’s up there on the basis of what he’s achieved. All the more so because Roglič isn’t really a specialized GC slenderman like Froome or Vingegaard or Alberto Contador. He’s a puncheur at heart, who happens to be so good his skills translate to the other stuff. Remember, he’s also won Liège–Bastogne–Liège and an Olympic time trial gold medal.

Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to ding Roglič for never having won the Tour de France. Four of his five grand tour victories came in the least prestigious race of the three, and he’s only ever beaten a full-strength Pogačar when the latter was basically an infant. Every other rider with five or more grand tour wins has won the Tour at least once, except for Alfredo Binda, who raced like a million years ago.

As impressive as Roglič’s counting stats are, they’re colored by the one piece of trivia everyone knows about him: He came to the sport very late. Roglič was a ski jumper into his early 20s, and by the time he raced his first grand tour, the 2016 Giro, he was older than Pogačar is now. He didn’t lead his first GC challenge at the Tour de France until he was 28.

Back then, when the competition was the end of Sky/Ineos, in a field so desperate for animation Julian Alaphilippe almost wore the maillot jaune into Paris, Roglič might’ve won a Tour or two. Or more, if he’d started as early as Pogačar and Egan Bernal and Evenepoel did.

And indeed, there was a time when he was the undisputed best GC rider in the world. Unfortunately, that reign came to an end when Pogačar had the best day of his life in a time trial in 2020. And any chance Roglič had to strike back fell victim to crashes and the emergence of Vingegaard, which pushed him out of leadership at what was then Jumbo-Visma.

Now, Roglič is almost 35, and the gap between him and his younger rivals is only getting bigger. If he’d come to the sport five years earlier, maybe he’d have become his sport’s Michael Jordan.

Roglič’s legacy, I believe, will end up being something different. Transformative figures within a sport tend to be the first person to figure out something that nobody else had realized: Steph Curry, Babe Ruth, Michael Schumacher, Tiger Woods. Within a few years, everyone else has seen proof of concept and copied the breakthrough, but by that point the revolutionary figure has won a few titles, and perhaps even moved on to the next thing.

Roglič made that breakthrough by unifying the GC rider and puncheur categories, promoting an aggressive style of riding that could win a grand tour by torching opponents on short climbs and sometimes even in bunch sprints, as he did to Carapaz at the 2020 Vuelta. Heavy a favorite as Roglič was heading into this Vuelta, and as good as he was on the big mountains, he would not have been able to beat O’Connor if not for the specific tactical and physical gifts he pioneered at the end of the 2010s. He was by no means the first rider of this type—Alejandro Valverde and Cadel Evans paved the path for him a decade earlier—but Roglič systematized it, made it consistent.

But because Roglič didn’t put it all together until he was almost 30, and because Pogačar and Evenepoel followed with the next evolutionary step so quickly, Roglič won’t go down as a Michael Jordan. Maybe a David Thompson. He showed the world how to play above the rim, but he didn’t stay there long enough to get credit for changing the game.

Those who truly know ball—or know wheel, in this case—will be able to appreciate what an important figure Roglič will end up being in the history of the sport. But just saying that illustrates why sports discourse in this country gravitates so heavily toward the reductive. He’d probably trade that legacy, without a second thought, for an extra minute’s worth of speed on the Planche des Belles Filles.

1. Perhaps this is why it’s so attractive from a content creation point of view

2. And, like, I guess Froome still technically counts as active.

3. Unless you count Mark Cavendish, who’s on his way out.