Tadej Pogačar

Tadej Pogačar is a Slovenian road cyclist who rides for UAE Team Emirates XRG. He was born on 21 September 1998 and grew up in Klanec, in the municipality of Komenda, north of Ljubljana. He followed his older brother Tilen into the Rog Ljubljana club at the age of nine. Andrej Hauptman, later the Slovenian national coach, spotted him in 2011 and went on to coach him. Riding for the Slovenian national team, he won the under-23 Tour de l’Avenir in 2018.

He joined UAE Team Emirates in 2019. That year he won the Tour of California, then the youngest rider to win a UCI WorldTour stage race, and finished third at his first Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España, with three stage wins. In 2020 he won the Tour de France on his first start, taking the yellow jersey in the time trial to La Planche des Belles Filles on the penultimate day. He was the first Slovenian to win the race and also won the mountains and young rider classifications. He won the Tour again in 2021, with the same three jerseys, and took his first Monuments that year at Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Il Lombardia, as well as bronze in the Olympic road race in Tokyo.

He finished second at the Tour to Jonas Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023. In 2024 he won the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in the same year, the first rider to do so since Marco Pantani in 1998, with six stage wins in each race. He then won the world road race title in Zurich and became the third man, after Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche, to complete cycling’s Triple Crown. In 2025 he won a fourth Tour, kept his world title in Kigali, won the European road race and took a fifth Il Lombardia in a row, the first rider to win the same Monument five consecutive times.

In 2026 he won Strade Bianche for a record fourth time, Milano–Sanremo for the first time, the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and finished second at Paris–Roubaix. He won the Tour de Romandie and the Tour de Suisse, then a fifth Tour de France, 6 minutes 26 seconds ahead of Remco Evenepoel, with five stage wins including Alpe d’Huez. He returned to the Vuelta a España, won three stages, but crashed out on stage 8 with a concussion, a broken collarbone and a fractured vertebra. On 5 September his team said he would not race again in 2026 and that his contract had been extended to 2032.