How Do You Actually Beat Tadej Pogačar at the Tour de France?

Tadej Pogacar has become cycling's final boss. Every generation has one rider who forces the rest of the peloton to rethink what is possible. In the 1970s, it was Eddie Merckx. During the late 2010s, Team Sky rewrote the playbook for Grand Tour racing with relentless control and precision. But the turning point came on La Planche de Belphi in 2020, where Tadej Pogacar took his very first victory at the Tour and now the sport belongs to him. Pogacar wins on the biggest mountains and steepest slopes. He can even win on time trials and uphill sprints against the very best climbers. Then just to remind everyone how unique he is, he heads to the spring classics and wins races that were once considered impossible for Grand Tour contenders to compete at. Strade Bianche with punishing gravel sectors and the Tour of Flanders with its brutal cobble climbs have both fallen to the Slovenian and he now holds the all-time records in both of the races. There is no obvious weakness to his exploit because there is seemingly no terrain where he cannot dominate. Perhaps the most frightening part is that not even crashing appears capable of slowing him down anymore. During the 2025 Tour de France, he hit the tarmac twice. The first instance came after contact with Tobias Halle-Johannesson and the second happened when the Vismalisa bike car unexpectedly braked with Pogacar directly behind it and we've even seen his amazing recovery at last year's Strade Bianche where he crashed there and subsequently hunted down Tom Peacock and took the victory and even this year at Milan San Remo as well crashing very late but still managing to get to the front and winning the race. In years gone by, any of these incidents would have completely derailed a rider's race. Instead, Pogacar simply climbed back onto the bike, dusted himself off and carried on to win. It almost feels as though the cycling gods themselves have run out of ideas. So that leaves one question, how do you actually beat Tadej Pogacar? Before we start the video as well make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and do check out our preview of the Tour de France with Jens Voigt. Looking back through the years where Pogacar has looked vulnerable is a very small list. The victories achieved by his biggest rivals and tactical lessons of the last few seasons, there are five realistic solutions to defeating Pogacar. None of these guarantee success but history suggests they are the closest thing to a blueprint. The first lesson came at the 2022 Tour de France when Jumbo Visma produced what remains the greatest tactical performance against Tadej Pogacar so far. Rather than relying on one leader to defeat him in a straight fight, he forced him into a race of constant decision making. Primož Roglič attack repeatedly making himself impossible to ignore. Every acceleration demanded an immediate response from Pogacar because allowing a Roglič quality to disappear off the road would have ended the Tour potentially. Just as Pogacar closed one gap, launched another attack. It was relentless, the Slovenian was never given the opportunity to settle into his rhythm because the pressure never stopped. The brilliance of the strategy wasn't that either Roglič or Vingo were individually stronger, it was that Pogacar had to produce every decisive effort himself while Jumbo Visma divided the workload between two genuine Tour contenders. Every acceleration cost the Slovenian a little more energy and every chase reduced the advantage of his natural strength. By the time decisive attacks arrived in the mountains, UAE Team Emirates had been stripped away and Pogacar was fighting alone. It remains the clearest demonstration that even the strongest rider can't be defeated if the race becomes tactically impossible. Obviously for this to work you would first of all need two genuinely strong riders that are viable Tour de France contenders and can be very close to the level of Pogacar but equally also a team that is stronger to eliminate UAE Team Emirates which is becoming increasingly hard to do with them getting stronger every year. Again coming back to Jumbo Visma slash Visma Lisa Bike and they have Wout Menaert who is very unlike any domestique in the modern peloton. He can control stages, he can survive mountain passes and drive the pace through the valleys and still arrive at the decisive climb capable of setting an infernal tempo. His versatility meant that Jumbo Visma dictated races long before the television cameras focused on the final ascent. Menaert has been used in two very decisive moments. He was used in the 2022 Horticum stage where he was up the road and Jonas Vingor linked up with him and we saw the incredible pictures of the yellow jersey on the wheel of the green jersey dropping the white jersey eventually and that led to Jonas Vingor winning that day as well. That was an absolutely impressive performance and obviously Wout Menaert having been in the breakaway and being allowed to rest and then just being a bit of a turbo charge for Jonas Vingor was incredible to see and obviously we've seen this tactic used before with Wout Menaert. Wout was used for the Giro d'Italia. Yes, there was no Tarbogaccia but his heir was there of Isaac del Toro. We saw Isaac del Toro getting distracted with Richard Carapaz, Simon Yates attacking but U18 moments had naively let Wout Menaert up in the break and once Simon Yates attacked he bridged up to Wout Menaert and once again Wout Menaert turbocharged the gap between Simon Yates and Isaac del Toro and subsequently he won the Giro d'Italia. Much of it coming down to Wout Menaert's impressive effort. So Wout Menaert if he can be used in a scenario like that where Jonas Vingor or whoever bridges up to him that could definitely be used to stretch out a huge margin but again the problem here is you would first of all need to get Wout Menaert up the road and that's more difficult now with those two examples already have shown how powerful he is and obviously you would have to break down the whole U18 memories team as well so that is again a very hard one to do but not impossible. So the third way is also a similar theme. One of the biggest mistakes teams would continue to make is waiting until the final mountain before attacking Pogacar. By then he usually has teammates around him, fresh legs beneath him and enough confidence to answer almost anything plus had no real strain throughout the day. The better strategy would be to spend the entire day dismantling U18 members piece by piece, attack the domestiques instead of attacking the leader, force them to chase dangerous breakaways, increase the pace over every climb, make them burn energy long before the decisive attempt begins. Eventually Pogacar finds himself isolated, responsible for responding personally to every acceleration. Even the greatest rider in the world has limits if he's required to close every gap alone. The challenge is that U18 members have assembled one of the deepest mountain squads in modern cycling making isolation far easier to describe rather than achieve. Still history has shown that Pogacar has looked vulnerable. It has usually been because he reached the decisive climb without his teammates. It even seemed that altitude would be a problem at some point. That was the big advantage that Jonas Bingo seemingly had over Pogacar but that didn't really come to fruition in the 2024 Tour de France so we're almost out of ideas. But another one is force him to mark the wrong rider. One of the few ways to defeat a rider who is stronger than everyone else is to force him into marking the wrong rival. This tactic we could kind of say at the 2022 Tour de France where he did respond to Roglic's attack and paying less attention to Bingo seemingly rather than just focusing on Bingo. But the same philosophy has already delivered success at the last defeat Tad Pogacar had at the Tour of the Basque Country back in 2021. It was the last race he lost on purely tactical merit. Jonas Bingo neutralized the Slovenian by refusing to help him as Roglic had already gotten off the road with a break. Pogacar could not ignore Roglic because he was becoming the race leader. Equally he could not simply ride away from Bingo who was glued onto his wheel another GC threat. It was a textbook example of numerical superiority overcoming the individual brilliance and this was a very effective way of doing it. Roglic didn't win the stage but he did win the GC and Tad Pogacar had to settle for a place on the podium. A kind of variation of this idea would also be the 2023 Vuelta a España. Here Jan Bivisma entered the race with Roglic, Bingo and Sepp Kuss giving them three riders capable of the GC apparently. And Sepp Kuss got up the road early on in the race and managed to get the red jersey and build a gap and that also meant that effectively they had control of the race with one leader and two riders that could win the race outright as well. Riders felt themselves trapped. Every move they made seemed to benefit another Jan Bivisma rider. While the circumstances were different the lesson remained the same. The easiest rider to beat is one who has too many threats to cover at once. If another team hopes to defeat Pogacar in the future they would need to create that exact dilemma. Give one rider enough freedom to become a genuine threat on GC by getting in a breakaway, getting a lot of minutes and then being able to defend that all the way to the finish of a grand tour. Another shadows Pogacar's every movement forced him into choosing which rider represents the greater danger. It sounds simple but almost no team possesses two or even three riders sufficient of this quality to execute this idea. But on paper it could definitely be something that could be tried. The final possibility may be the most intriguing because it doesn't come from and on the team at all but it comes within the team because beating Pogacar is the title of the video. So someone like Isaac del Toro has emerged as one as one of cycling's brightest young stars and his development raises fascinating questions about the future of YouTube Emirates. Right now he strengthens Pogacar's position by giving him another exceptional teammate in the mountains. Yet history suggests that dynasties eventually encounter problems from within rather than from outside. We saw that with Wiggins and Froome. We've seen it with Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond and young champions rarely remain content riding in sport forever. As ambitions grow difficult conversations become inevitable and follow. There is no indication that such tensions exist today and del Toro has shown every sign of embracing his role within the team. Even so cycling has repeatedly demonstrated that super teams become the hardest to manage when they possess more than one rider capable of winning the biggest races. If Pogacar is ever to face a genuine challenge from inside his own organization it's likely to come from another extraordinary talent and someone who has developed alongside him. When analysts spend more time discussing and elaborating tactical traps numerical advantages and hypothetical future teammates than actual sporting weakness it tells you everything about the rider that they're trying to beat. Tad Pogacar has reached a level where victory is no longer decided solely by who has the strongest legs. Beating him now requires flawless teamwork and the perfect timing as the race unfolds. Even then it may not be enough. That is the reality facing every rider who rolls down the start ramp of the Tour de France. They are no longer simply racing to win the yellow jersey. They are trying to solve the hardest puzzle pro cycling has ever seen in generations and until someone proves otherwise Tad Pogacar remains unsolved and the sport belongs to him. That's basically it for this video. There is also another way in which he could be defeated and that is if he simply gets too bored of winning and we saw that a bit last year at the Tour de France. Do subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and check out some of the other videos here on the channel as well. But for now thank you for watching and I will see you around.