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    BOY KING

    Oct 09, 2020 8 minutes
    Writer Alasdair Fotheringham
    Image Chris Auld

    Primož Roglic won’t want to hear it, but Tadej Pogacar didn’t initially want to take part in the Tour de France this year.

    “I was talking to Tadej when the season was getting underway, and he wasn’t so interested in the Tour,” Joxean Fernández Matxin, UAE Emirates DS, tells Procycling. “He was much keener on doing the Giro this year and then the Tour the next. But I told him the best idea would be to do the Tour now, where with [Fabio] Aru as leader, he’d be able to learn what it’s like without any pressure.”

    Matxin’s argument about learning without pressure proved far more successful than the veteran Basque director could have imagined, even if Pogacar’s ability to grasp the essential notions of grand tour racing at a speed that other, far more battlescarred pros, have never managed to master was already blindingly obvious to the cycling world in the Vuelta last year.

    But what the world now wants to know is how Pogacar, at 21, riding his first ever Tour de France and second grand tour, managed in a single, spellbinding hour to transform a runner’s up spot seemingly set in stone into a devastating last-minute triumph. In 36.2 kilometres, Pogacar claimed his third stage, recaptured the King of the Mountains (and if we all felt a bit sorry for Roglic, spare a thought for Ineos Grenadiers rider Richard Carapaz, whose own chances of

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