Tadej Pogačar has picked up in 2025 where he left off last season.
Pogačar again blitzed the field at Strade Bianche and made mincemeat of three-time champion Mathieu van der Poel at the Tour of Flanders.
His haul of eight career wins in the season's Monuments – the biggest one-day races, or 'Classics' – puts him sixth on the all-time list. That's ahead of Fabian Cancellara and Tom Boonen, two riders who were the defining Classics riders of their generation, by a rider who's also won three Tours de France.
On the eve of a first tilt at Paris-Roubaix (the Monument that, on paper, he's least suited to but enters as second favourite) we look at the changes Pogačar made to his training through 2024 that have put him in the conversation as the greatest cyclist of all time.
The impact of Pogačar’s new coach Javier Sola
Iñigo San Millán, Pogačar’s trainer for over five years, has been crucial to his success. But change was afoot for 2024.
San Millán took up the position of director of performance at football club Athletic Bilbao in October 2023 (he still retains consultancy status at the UAE team though) while Spanish coach Javier Sola took on Pogačar.
The 38-year-old began working with UAE in 2023 and his palmares features numerous Olympic, European Championship and Paralympic medals. He specialises in human performance and biomechanics.
Pogačar sounds positive about the change. “Iñigo and I had a good relationship, his training was super good for me. But maybe sometimes you need a change of pace, different stuff, different styles of training,” Pogačar said in a press conference after winning the 2024 Giro d’Italia by nearly 10 minutes.
“After five years or so, it was a little bit much with the same training. So, this year [2024] I tried something new, including different things off the bike, like more work on my physique.”
This physique work stemmed from sessions with top Monaco physical conditioner Alexandre Baccili, who’s also worked with Chris Froome and Egan Bernal. We contacted Baccili for details of their work, but he wasn't giving anything away.
“With my prehab and rehab work, we look to build more balanced, stronger riders,” he told us.
We’ve heard, however, that his work with Pogačar included working on his core and stabiliser muscles to help maintain an aerodynamic position for longer.
Sola was also keen to stay out of the spotlight when we tried to contact him. However, during the Giro, Pogačar, he revealed how they’d focused more on longer tempo (zone 3) and threshold (zone 4) efforts. These were seen as key to matching Jonas Vingegaard on the highest, longest climbs.
Arguably, this meant a little more intensity than before because San Millán has become famous for his zone 2 work.
This hasn’t been confirmed, albeit an unverified leak from a team insider suggested Pogačar had spent more time working on his fast-twitch muscle fibres, helped by increased efforts behind a scooter.
Responding to the supposed leak, Pogačar said: “I have no idea who he is… There are some things in his messages that are true, but the vast majority are wrong.”
More credible are sessions revealed by one of the team’s sponsors, indoor-cycling platform MyWhoosh.
Writing on the brand’s website, pro rider Zach Nehr includes four of Pogačar’s pre-Tour sessions that focus on tempo (zone 3) work; criss-cross tempo, which has race-like accelerations; sprints of 15 seconds; and VO2 Max efforts: repeated intense efforts of over 110% of functional threshold power (FTP).
Prolonged spells at altitude have boosted Pogačar
In 2024, Pogačar was relatively late to the altitude party, heading to Sierra Nevada in southern Spain after destroying the opposition at the Volta a Catalunya in March.
This compared to his Tour de France rivals Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe) and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quickstep), who had already spent time up Teide in Tenerife.
After duly winning Liège–Bastogne–Liège and the Giro d’Italia, Pogačar then had some downtime at his home in Monaco before returning to altitude in the build-up to the Tour de France, this time at Isola 2000, where he’d later win a stage.
In fact, former pro rider-turned-analyst Serge Pauwels has suggested altitude training was one of the reasons why Pogačar beat Marco Pantani’s tarnished climbing record of the Plateau de Beille in 1998 by nearly four minutes.
“He pedalled 6.8 or 6.9 watts per kilo. It’s a world-class performance,” Pauwels commented at the Tour.
“Back then, Pantani mainly rode alone, which meant he had little shelter. Today, Pogačar gets the leadout of his life.
"First Matteo Jorgenson rides full on from the foot. Then Vingegaard, the second-best rider in the world, keeps riding at a high pace. Then Pogačar adds his best 15 minutes. All conditions were good to ride a fast time… The 90s was the era of super fuel. That’s been replaced by altitude training.”
Why, physiologically do riders head high? “When cyclists head to altitude, around 1,500m to 2,500m, they’re looking for haematological benefits, the most important of which is an increase in haemoglobin mass,” explains altitude expert Iñigo Mujika.
“Haemoglobin is a protein in red blood cells that binds to oxygen. At altitude, the body’s strain for oxygen sees it crank up levels of the hormone EPO (erythropoietin) to produce more red blood cells to cling onto oxygen.
“This increases your VO2 max. Other adaptations include a greater capacity to transport and use glycogen, plus a greater buffering of lactate, meaning you can theoretically pedal harder for longer.”
How Pogačar has played around with his position
In 2024, Pogačar and his teammates used Colnago’s V4Rs race bike. The Slovenian won his first two Tour de France titles aboard the V3Rs but, says Colnago’s Tommaso Cervetti, as you’d expect, the latest incarnation has evolved.
“There’s a more aerodynamic frame with more streamlined tubes,” the Italian tells us.
“For example, the top tube features a more flowing profile and thinner seatstays, while there’s also a stiffer and lighter fork steerer with a round tube. Other features include a T47 bottom bracket, wider fork legs and the ability to fit up to 32mm tyres.”
Pogačar, says Cervetti, was the first to test the early prototype of the V4Rs back in April 2022.
“Subsequently, at December’s training camps, it’s common to recheck and evaluate the positioning of every rider aboard the V4R including Pogačar. UAE Team Emirates has a pool of bike fitters that work in conjunction with the performance manager [Jeroen Swart from the University of Cape Town].”
As for the time-trial bike with which he won a stage of both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in 2024, that’s Colnago’s blinged-up TT1, which debuted in 2022.
“This bike’s taken full advantage of the new ‘relaxed’ rules put out by the UCI for TT frames. Take the fork legs, which are the deepest you can get, at 80mm.
"Even though the bike is disc-brake equipped, it’s still faster than its rim-brake predecessor. It also has a fully integrated water bottle and numerous 3D-printed parts, both in plastic and titanium.
“It can also be ridden with up to a 64t double chainring. The main philosophy about this bike is that the frame has a low stack, so it’s common to see higher-than-average spacer towers beneath the riders’ TT extensions.”
And, in the case of Pogačar, shorter-than-average cranks. “He uses 165mm cranks. He used to ride with longer cranks [172.5mm] but he’s used those since 2023. He also scaled up 5mm in handlebar stem size.
“That’s since he moved the saddle forward a little bit. Finally, the sizing is 485mm (bottom bracket to end of seat-tube) for the V4Rs and ‘small’ for the TT1.”
All of these changes are designed to steer the Slovenian into a sustainable and fast position, which also helps him generate his preferred higher cadence.
For 2025, Pogačar has another Colnago weapon to deploy, the new Y1RS aero bike, which he first used at the UAE Tour in February. Is the fastest about to get even faster?
How hyper-tailored nutrition entered the peloton
“Of all the riders on the team, when it comes to nutrition, I’d say he’s the most straightforward,” Gorka Prieto-Bellver, nutritionist at UAE Team Emirates, was reported as saying about Pogačar earlier this season.
“There are some who are way fussier, the ones who insist on having white pasta all the time and you just can’t convince them otherwise. But Tadej is the complete opposite. You’ll tell him, ‘You’ve got to eat this’ and he’ll eat it.”
With 93 professional victories to his name, there’s little to complain about, except perhaps the Col du Granon stage at the 2022 Tour de France, where he famously ran out of energy.
In his miraculous 2024 season, there was little sign of Pogačar hitting the wall, helped by an increasingly meticulous on-bike feeding plan.
In early 2024, Eurosport correspondent and Classics legend Philippe Gilbert noticed a colour-coded strip on Pogačar’s top tube at Milan-Sanremo, where he finished third.
The strip broke down fuelling hotspots during the long day in Italy including, revealed Prieto-Bellver, the rider’s personalised water bottle schedule.
“The strip perfectly indicates which of the caregivers will be ready where and when exactly with which type of drinking bottle(s),” he revealed.
“The Xs and H2Os refer to the doses – 30, 60 or 90g – of carbohydrates in the bottle. Those who have to go ‘all the way’ [hard to the finish line] need more carbohydrates.
“Riders who, so to speak, only have to follow the peloton, take less. The colours indicate the people who will administer them.”
Prieto-Bellver said that Pogačar has been trained to know that if he goes at “such-and-such a speed, he has to eat that much more, and if he’s sticking in the bunch, he needs to eat that much less”.
He also said riders at UAE Team Emirates now routinely consume up to 130g carbs per hour, which has been credited as one reason behind the ever-faster speeds of the peloton.
Artificial intelligence’s unlocking of performance gains
Is Pogačar’s granular nutrition plan down to information gleaned from artificial intelligence? Perhaps, because last season the team rolled out a press release that highlighted their link-up with AI outfit Presight, who also work in Formula One.
“Presight will work closely with UAE Team Emirates using Generative AI big data analytics to help enhance athlete performance, training methodologies and strategic decision-making throughout the season, which will also see a number of events and activations of the sponsorship around the world,” read the release pronouncing their collaboration.
The minutiae of what that means is again the intellectual property of his team.
However, UAE Team Emirates’ performance co-ordinator Jeroen Swart did reveal in early summer that “it’s likely to start identifying other variables or other patterns that we may not have considered in the past. And that may give some novel insight that could unlock performance in certain athletes”.
The potential is huge with every facet of elite performance – from time-trial optimisation and nutritional strategies for every stage to rider selection for each race and scouting – potentially refined with AI.
The aerodynamic arms race has expanded to an artificial intelligence one, with UAE stealing a march on their rivals.
Although the Presight deal hit the news last year, UAE has been working with Presight’s AI parent company, G42, for at least three years.
Training to perform as the mercury rises
Pogačar and Sola have reportedly paid greater focus to heat training. This would deliver twofold benefits.
The first, of course, is that Pogačar is as prepped as possible for the brutal summer temperatures in France.
The second is arguably down to research that shows ‘heat shock proteins’, stimulated when riding in the heat, also better prepare a rider for altitude.
And one final heat win is that recent research shows a short spell of heat training between coming down from altitude and lining up for a Grand Tour prevents the decay of altitude benefits, such as greater haemoglobin mass for longer when back at sea level.
Pogačar uses a Core temperature sensor. This is a square-shaped wearable device that’s positioned on the side of the torso.
Ideally, it’s clipped to a chest strap or bra strap, although adhesive patches can be used for sleeping or everyday activities. It works by measuring the thermal energy transfer moving from or into the body.
This is then processed by an algorithm to calculate real-time core body temperature and relayed to either a smartphone or a Core-twinned device such as a top-end Garmin bike computer.
We contacted the UK PR arm of Core to ask about the association between the brand and UAE Team Emirates, but were told the team bought them privately and so share no data with Core.
Core does have official partnerships with 10 WorldTour teams, including Soudal-QuickStep (men and women) and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.
One of its uses is acclimatising to the heat. As you spend more time training in the heat, your body stimulates numerous adaptations that are conducive to better performance in the heat, such as increased blood plasma and sweat rate.
To that end, Core’s recently categorised heat adaptation into four distinct levels if you don’t have a team behind you like Pogačar.
They are 0–24%, thermal rookie; 25-49%, heat accustomed; 50-89%, heat adapted; and 90-100%, heat champion.
The sensor’s also being used to help understand trends in thermoregulation so the team can implement cooling strategies, such as hydration, plus it’s possible to refine warm-ups and pacing strategies.
