Tadej Pogacar had the challenge of winning the three big races in the Ardennes this season: Amstel Gold Race, Fleche Wallonne and Liège Bastogne Liège. He managed to win the first two with clarity and forcefulness, while for the third he started as a great favorite together with Remco Evenepoel. However, everything went wrong when 174 km from the finish line he crashed and I had to leave after suffering his biggest injury since he turned professional in 2019: fractures to the left scaphoid and lunate bones. That is, wrist problems and operation. Tadej’s first major setback in his award-winning career at 24, and despite this he celebrated: “I was lucky to break my wrist.” It could have been much worse. The mishap came just as he was about to end his classic season and before ‘activating’ the Tour de France mode (since July 1).
Now, almost a month later, The Slovenian published advances on his favorable evolution that he is taking at his home in Monaco. He has been living in the Principality for some time now, although this winter he moved to a more spacious home. Squats, sit-ups, rolling pins in the kitchen, climbing stairs with weights… Pogacar is training hard before going back to doing what he does best: riding a bike. At the moment, the closest thing to it is to continue with the roller before going out to roll. He also took advantage of this break to encourage, from a distance, his partner, Urška Žigart, also a runner and who is completing the intense month of May on the Spanish women’s calendar. “We have a lot of good people. Sport is always important since we started at school and I think that in the end it shows”, Žigart told AS in La Vuelta Femenina about the great Slovenian athletes of the last decade.
In 2023, Tadej Pogacar has 12 wins in one of the most successful first parts of the season in memory, and that the Tour de France is his great objective, but he does not leave aside, far from it, the rest of the calendar. To fight for their third crown in Paris they will have Jonas Vingegaard, defender of the crown, as their main opponent. At the end of the month, the UAE will start a concentration in height in Sierra Nevada, and if the feelings continue to be good, the team’s idea is for Tadej to be present. These next two weeks will be key to it. As usual, the Tour of Slovenia (from June 14) would be his race before the Grande Boucle. It will be an important test, more on a personal level than in terms of competition, in case Tadej can prove himself before traveling to Bilbao to play his fourth Tour.
