Pogačar v LeMond

I wrote earlier that in the game of making comparisons of the Yellow Jersey, Tadej Pogačar, to illustrious riders of the past my pick was Greg LeMond and thought I’d expand a bit on the idea.

 To begin, they are both – speaking of Greg’s racing days of course – almost the same size and weight at 5’8” and 147- lbs., physiques that are both light for climbing yet carrying enough muscle mass to power through the crucial time trials. By comparison, Sunday’s winner, Sepp Kuss, is 5’11” and 134-lbs, a fantastic climber but handicapped in the TT’s.

 The two stars won the Tour de l’Avenir at young ages, Pogačar at 19, LeMond at 21, and both won the premier American stage race: Pogačar the Tour of California and LeMond the Coors Classic. They are ‘complete’ racers, able to climb and time trial, the crucial combo required to win a Tour de France, but on top of those qualities are their sprinting and general race-winning skills – both love to win and have that special sense of timing mixed with raw desire that brings victories.

 By 22-years-old LeMond had won the Dauphinè and was World Champion, Pogačar at the same age already has a Tour de France in the pocket plus a Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but exact time/result comparisons can’t be measured because of the differences in eras. Greg was brought more carefully along, the consensus in the 1980’s and before was that young riders had to be developed slowly, like boxers, and not put in long races before they were deemed mature enough to handle them. Today things are different, there was an 18-year-old in the Giro d’Italia this year to show how far it’s all gone – too far - in the opposite direction. What’s more, as the dramatic 1985 Tour showed the world, LeMond raced beneath the shadow of Bernard Hinault for six years while the Slovenian has been a team leader almost from the beginning after his third place at the Vuelta a España launched the then 19-year-old into orbit.

 There’s one special quality about Tadej Pogačar that seems to have escaped observation so far; the fact that he is a beautiful stylist. “He looks like Gimondi when he climbs,” observed my friend Wade. It’s true, his legs turn a perfect circle, knees and heels go straight up and down as though guided by a wires, he can go big or twiddle a small gear as he chooses. Like Greg, and you can see this from the time trial camera shots, Pogačar has immense strength in his hips and buttocks, those large muscles that spark the pedal action and add great power when correctly used.

 It’s at this point that they diverge a bit. LeMond, as a junior, used to ride way out into the Nevada desert, straight into a headwind, turn around and ride the tailwind home, turning a 42 x 17 at 160+ rpm the entire way. He had speed, real speed as his Silver Medal at the 1979 Junior World Pursuit Championships – on top of his Gold in the road race - proved. Those high-speed pedal action qualities in LeMond, the techniques that every top racer today possesses to one degree or another, were suppressed when he signed with Cyrille Guimard and his high-tech Renault-Gitane team. 

 Guimard was enchanted by a radical new theory on position, developed in the Renault F1 wind tunnels, a position based on pure power and slower pedal action. The Gitane’s were built with 72-degree seat angles, the saddles shoved all the way to the rear, the cranks lengthened, the stems lowered. The racers were, in essence, sitting over the back wheel and pushing the pedals forward rather than down. Those positions, in today’s warp speed era, are completely outmoded, the riders now over the center of their machines, more like track racers. 

 I once spoke with LeMond about his 1989 Tour victory and the famous 24.5-km time trial where he surmounted a 50” deficit on the late Laurent Fignon to win. That TT was slightly downhill with a tailwind. I proposed to LeMond that had the TT direction been reversed he might not have won, that it was his early formation as a pedaler that came into play on the long, slightly downhill sections of the race where he had the ability to “get on top of the gear”, to keep adding pressure and speed where Fignon was “running out of gear” unable to rev high enough with his pure Guimard formation. LeMond didn’t disagree and I remember that towards the end of his career he become enthusiastic about the benefits of fast pedal action.

 I firmly believe that had LeMond turned pro for say, an Italian team, that had he kept his original technical formation, his fantastic speed, that on top of his already most illustrious career, like Pogačar today, he would have slaughtered everyone, and I mean everyone.