Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) may be riding his first race at the GP Québec on Friday since winning the Tour de France on July 21, however, men's cycling's top rider had no regrets about his choice of schedule nor skipping the Paris Olympics so that he could properly recover.
It's been 52 days for the Slovenian without pinning a race number to his back, the same number of race days he's completed in 2024 so far, with 21 wins in that time and nearly all of them stunningly dominant, so it was a deserved couple of months away from competition.
While he had been set to ride the Olympics, he pulled out 12 days before the road race, citing tiredness and later his partner Urška Žigart's non-selection by the Slovenian federation as reasons. However, despite his fresh look after dominating much of the Tour's 21 stages en route to an historic win, Pogačar was simply exhausted.
"I didn’t like a lot of people pushing me to go to the Olympics, calling me and saying that ‘I should be there, I could get an easy medal’, nothing is easy in cycling especially the Olympic Games on this kind of parcours," said Pogačar at the press conference ahead of the GP Québec and Montréal on Wednesday afternoon.
"I think I made the right decision because the day after the Tour de France I was completely destroyed.
"The legs were tired but I think it was a hard season from Strade Bianche to the Tour de France. It was all the way full gas and I was in super good shape and after the Tour when I switched off, my body went kind of into shutdown mode and I was feeling quite bad the first two weeks."
But now he's fully refreshed and ready to get back to racing again after enjoying his first 'proper summer in so many years' and experiencing 'normal life' after the big block of racing from May through July.
The experience of top-level racing returned instantly the day after Pogačar arrived in Canada as he was surrounded by media as the headline rider. However, while it's no secret that he is here preparing for the World Championships in Zurich, Pogačar was taking nothing for granted heading into the two brutally difficult one-day races.
"Quebec is quite an open race but in the past, the attacks didn’t work very well and a lot of times it comes to the sprint, but the sprint is super hard," said Pogačar.
"But here we have a strong team so let’s see. I think we can make a hard race and we’ll see how the legs are turning if I can attack or just wait for the sprint."
The Slovenian confirmed that he was, of course, going to 'try and win both if I can' but did single out the impressive Arnaud De Lie (Lotto Dstny), last year's winner in Québec, as a key rival for Friday's race and admitted that any slip up in the last of the 16 laps around the city could be fatal for a good result.
"De Lie I think can be really big for the sprint or Michael Matthews but it’s a tough sprint so if you make one little mistake in the last lap, you can pay for it in the sprint," Pogačar said.
He was modest in his estimations of himself, stating that after resuming proper training two weeks after the Tour, he could be 'pretty decent' once he takes the start of his first race back.
"Two weeks after the Tour I was back in structured training, slowly rebuilding but nothing crazy," he said.
"Normally after a long period of training, the first race is not so good. But I saw at the beginning of the year for Strade Bianche how the preparation was for that race" - which he won with an 80km solo in his 2024 debut - "and I think I can be pretty decent in Quebec, better than previous years after the long period of no racing but you never know."
However, while he played Nostradamus for the racing on Tuscany's white gravel roads back in March, he refused to reveal on which of the 17 laps in Montréal he would launch his, likely, race-winning move, wanting to keep some of the mystery alive.
Pogačar also showed no signs of his wit slowing down at the press moment, quipping about taking a possible trip to Disneyland while his team sorted travel issues out at the airport in Paris, causing them to arrive a few hours later than planned.
"I had the wrongly done [ETA] but it was all good and we arrived. I did want to go to Disneyland, it would be really good but it was not so convenient at the end in Paris," he laughed.
"A couple of us were stuck in Paris for a while but I arrived, my suitcase didn’t, but all is good," he said before responding "Of course, I’m professional" to whether he still had his racing shoes despite the mishap. Tadej Pogačar is back and ready for more in 2024.
