Tadej Pogacar in Coppi compliant and chloroform – Release

To find out how the Tour of Lombardy would unfold this Saturday, October 12, all you had to do was open the morning sports dailies to the cycling page. Or to consult the specialized sites for three weeks, the moment when Tadej Pogacar seized the world champion jersey in Zurich. All that remained for the Slovenian was to win the Lombard event, the last monument of the season, to complete a full year. A formality, since he had already won it the three previous years. And as it was written, that’s what he did: the UAE Team Emirates rider won the Dead Leaves Classic today for the fourth time in a row. A feat achieved only once before him, by Italian cycling legend Fausto Coppi, between 1946 and 1949.

To know how Tadej Pogacar was going to do, again it was enough to read the press, or to have watched most of the races in which he has participated since the start of the season. The Slovenian was going to use the Colma di Sormano, the penultimate difficulty of the day, as a launching pad to isolate himself from ordinary mortals and cover roughly 50 miles alone. The only suspense perhaps lay there: precisely how many kilometers from the finish was Pogacar going to turn on the gas? 48.5, then. The other numerical question: what gap would he put on his first pursuer? More than three minutes on Remco Evenepoel, the Belgian with a special history in Lombardy, who has never been able to regain time, even on the flat. The Italian Giulio Ciccone completes the podium in Como.

Impressive, disturbing, annoying

By winning in Lombardy wearing his rainbow jersey, Tadej Pogacar concluded an unreal year. Victory in the Tour de France (his third), victory in the Tour of Italy (his first), victory in Liège-Bastogne-Liège (his second), victory in the world championships… This year, it is easier to count the races in which Pogacar lined up and which he did not win: Milan-San Remo, the Grand Prix de Québec and the Trois Vallées Varésines. Although the latter, it is because the downpours of water which poured over Italy caused the race to be suspended. Another way to place Pogacar is to note that he has scored more than 12,000 points in the International Cycling Union rankings in 2024. That is, alone, more than entire teams of 30 riders. Impressive, no doubt. Worrying, perhaps. Boring, certainly.