Too Good for His Own Sport? The Case For and Against Tadej Pogačar

Curated by Gary Edgington · Rider News

No rider has divided cycling quite like Tadej Pogačar. On the road he is close to untouchable — a four-time Tour de France champion in yellow again in 2026, world champion in the rainbow bands, a winner across terrain that used to demand specialists. Off it, he provokes an argument that will not settle: is he the best thing to happen to cycling in a generation, or a problem the sport does not quite know how to talk about? On Bastille Day this year he was booed on the road to Le Lioran even as he rode away to another solo win. The two reactions — awe and suspicion, gratitude and resentment — now travel together everywhere he goes. Here is the debate around the most dominant cyclist of his era, laid out as its various sides would argue it, with the questions fans keep asking taken one at a time.

How good is he, really?

Start with the record, because it is genuinely historic. Pogačar has won the Tour de France four times (2020, 2021, 2024 and 2025) and leads the 2026 edition. He won the Giro d’Italia at his first attempt in 2024 and took back-to-back World Championship road titles in 2024 and 2025 — the first man ever to hold the Tour and the world title simultaneously in two successive years. He has ten Monument victories: five editions of Il Lombardia, three of Liège–Bastogne–Liège and two Tours of Flanders. In 2024 he became only the third rider after Eddy Merckx (1974) and Stephen Roche (1987) to complete the Triple Crown of Giro, Tour and Worlds in a single season, and he passed 100 career wins in 2025. Merckx himself, the sport’s traditional yardstick, said after the 2024 Worlds that “it’s obvious that he is now above me,” though he later narrowed the remark to that specific race. Coaches reach for other sports to describe him: Tim Cusick of TrainingPeaks called him “a Michael Jordan here, a Tiger Woods,” and the performance analyst Adam Mills of Source Endurance rated him “a generational talent at worst.” On the raw evidence, the ceiling for how good he is has not yet been found.

Why is no one able to touch him?

The people who study performance for a living tend to give the same answer: everything at once. “He’s just better,” the Irish rider Ben Healy of EF Education–EasyPost said. “He never makes a mistake. He never misses a split. He rarely crashes … whatever his weakness is, it’s still almost always better than the people who are best at it.” That versatility is the crux: a pure climber can be dropped on a time trial, a time-triallist on a steep wall, but Pogačar is close to the best in the world at all of it, so there is no stage of a race where a rival can safely take time back. Add the strongest team in cycling — UAE Team Emirates–XRG can afford to put a rider of Isaac del Toro’s calibre in a supporting role — and the margins compound. Coaches also insist the speeds are explicable without foul play: Neal Henderson of Apex Coaching points to “significant development on the aerodynamic side” and argues the sustainable power at the front of the peloton is “just minimally different” from a normal evolutionary climb, while Cusick notes that riders in the old doping era were “basically trained like they were in the 1940s and 1950s” — a coaching revolution, on this view, closed a gap that drugs once filled. It is the same wall Jonas Vingegaard keeps running into; our companion piece on whether Vingegaard can still beat him lays out how even a two-time champion has struggled to find an answer.

The question the sport can’t avoid: doping

Dominance in cycling invites one accusation above all others, and Pogačar has not been spared it — despite never failing a test and despite there being no evidence of any wrongdoing. The doubt is about plausibility, not proof, and it is voiced most bluntly by researchers. The Danish doping scholar Vest Christiansen of Aarhus University has argued the numbers strain belief: riders, he says, are “breaking records and riding faster than in the time when doping was widespread,” calling it “really bizarre what Pogačar has achieved since 2023” and estimating he may have “increased his level by 7, 8, 9, or even 10 percent.” The line the skeptics return to is uncomfortable: “Just because you don’t see doping doesn’t mean it’s not there.” They point to the paradox reported everywhere in 2024, when several riders broke the old Mont Ventoux records by more than a minute — times faster than the peloton set in the sport’s dirtiest years.

The rebuttals are just as pointed, and come from inside the peloton. “I can pedal for two minutes at the intensity he maintains for 45 minutes,” the veteran Oliver Naesen said, arguing that lived experience of the level makes the suspicion feel cheap. Others, like the retired Grand Tour winner Tom Dumoulin, have counselled a more careful stance: doubt is legitimate, but naming a specific rider as a cheat without evidence is not. Healy makes the testing case — “at the Tour de France he gets tested every single day he’s in the yellow jersey… you can be really confident that the majority of guys are clean.” Pogačar himself meets the topic head-on. “There will always be doubts, because cycling was so damaged in the past,” he has said, calling the sport “one of the cleanest in the whole world” and framing doping as simply not worth it: “Taking anything that could risk your health … is super stupid.” He says he avoids even the grey areas, taking only what medical staff recommend and treating caffeine with caution. His camp goes further still: his agent has dismissed proposals to publish riders’ power data as “stupid,” insisting cycling “does not have this doping problem” and “now has credibility.” Between the researchers’ skepticism and the riders’ indignation sits a sport that, as ESPN noted, is “just now winning back the trust of fans who have already seen the impossible, only to learn later that it was all a sham” — which is exactly why the question refuses to die.

The case that he is bad for cycling

Set the doping question aside entirely and a separate complaint remains: that Pogačar is simply too dominant to be good for the spectacle. The booing on Stage 10 was the loudest expression of it, and he was, as one Yahoo Sports headline put it, “accused of spoiling” the Tour. The competitive grievance is real. Movistar’s sports director complained of UAE’s “suffocating tactics,” the argument being that the team’s control does not merely win the yellow jersey but strangles the rest of the race, denying breakaway riders the stage wins that are their whole season. BikeRadar asked, after his “ritual mauling of the peloton” on Bastille Day, whether the 2026 Tour was already over — and answered that history does not offer much hope to those wanting a contest. The deeper worry in this camp is structural: a sport whose biggest event feels decided by the second week risks losing the neutrals it spent a decade rebuilding, however blameless the champion himself may be.

The case that he is good for cycling

The counter-argument is led, among others, by the former professional and broadcaster David Millar, who pushes back hard on the “Pogačar is killing cycling” line. “Imagine the Tour de France without him,” Millar said, arguing that spectators come precisely because Pogačar is racing: “He is the principal attraction at the races he starts. When he retires, there’s going to be a huge, gaping hole.” On dominance itself he is unapologetic — “he dictates the races, I think that’s a good thing” — because unlike the calculating GC riders of the recent past, Pogačar attacks from distance, races the whole calendar, and chases wins he does not need. His own answer to the hostility has been cheerful defiance: “To all the guys that were booing, they give us more power. Thank you, thank you,” he said at Le Lioran, adding that “haters are going to hate” and that he admires how Novak Djokovic handles the same treatment in tennis. And there is the redemption reading, floated by ESPN and others: if a rider this dominant is genuinely clean, he does not damage cycling’s post-Armstrong recovery — he completes it.

Where is he headed?

Toward more, for a long time yet. In October 2024 Pogačar signed a contract extension with UAE Team Emirates through 2030 — reported at around 50 million euros over its length, among the richest deals the sport has seen — and made his priorities plain: “This team has been my home … I truly can’t imagine myself anywhere else.” The targets from here are the ones history keeps score by. He wants a record haul of Tour de France titles, moving on the marks of Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induraín. He wants the Vuelta a España, the one Grand Tour missing from his collection and the final piece of a career Grand Slam. And he wants the Monuments he has not yet won — most notably Milan–Sanremo, which has repeatedly slipped away, and the cobbled lottery of Paris–Roubaix, which he has begun to target. With the best rider of his generation locked in until he is 31, the realistic question is less whether he will keep winning than which of the sport’s oldest records will still be standing when he stops.

Why it matters

Strip away the noise and the debate over Tadej Pogačar is really a debate about what fans want from a champion. One camp wants suspense and sees a rider who removes it; another wants greatness and sees a rider delivering it in real time; a third wants certainty about how it is being done and knows the sport can no longer offer that to anyone. All three can point to something true, which is why the argument endures through every dominant July. What is not in dispute is the scale of what is happening: a rider rewriting the record book, dragging crowds to the roadside, and forcing cycling to decide how it feels about being this thoroughly beaten. The verdict, like so much in this sport, will be delivered not in a press room but on the road — over the years of racing Pogačar still has left to run.

CyclingFreePress