Reflecting on a Historic Year

It’s been a while. I got pretty burnt out on this blog after the Tour and skipped the rest of the season. It was a special year, and hopefully I can recapture some of that in this essay.

Some call it boring. Some call it farcical. But I think the majority of cycling fans call it awe-inspiring.

I’m speaking, of course, about the incredible dominance of the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, who just wrapped up the greatest season in cycling history, and against modern competition, no less.

First, let’s rewind to his first race of the season, Strade Bianchi, on March 2nd. After his team set a brutal pace on the rolling gravel roads of Tuscany (in rainy conditions) he did what told reporters prior to the race that he would do: attack 81 kilometers from the finish line. He went solo for two hours and won the race by nearly three minutes over his hapless competitors. Now to be fair, there were no other real heavy hitters in the race, but this demonstration was just a prelude to what was coming for the entire season.

Over seven months later, on October 12, and back in Italy, he finished the season as he began it. Pogi’s teammates controlled a dangerous breakaway on a cloudy day in Northern Italy, and led him out on the final climb of significance. He attacked with brutality and won Il Lombardia by an even bigger margin (3:16) with a 48k solo. This time, one of his major rivals, Remco Evenepoel, was present and duly destroyed by the rampaging successor to Eddy Merckx as the greatest cyclist of all time.

Speaking of Remco, that reminds me that before and during the early part of the season, there was a lot of talk from myself included about the “Big Six”. Now of course, there is still a Big Six (Pogacar, Remco, Jonas Vingegaard, Primoz Roglic, Mathieu van der Poel, and Wout van Aert) that tends to win almost every big race on the calendar. That has not changed from the beginning of the season, with the exception of Wout seemingly not being at the level to win many big races anymore, but that was not helped by two awful crashes this year.

However, at this point, we have to think more of a “Big One”. Pogacar is hogging all the biggest victories and all the headlines that come with them. He is far more dominant than any of the other five; he beat MVDP (and Wout) on the Flemish cobbles last year, Jonas (and Remco, and Roglic) in the Alps (and Pyrenees) and Remco (and MVDP) in the hills of Zurich at Worlds (and in the foothills of the Dolomites at Lombardia) this year.

So what happened between Strade and Lombardia? Well, to summarize all of his results, Pogacar finished a slightly-disappointing third at Milano-Sanremo (one of two Monuments he has yet to win), won four stages and the GC of the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya, won Liege-Bastogne-Liege, won six stages and the GC of the Giro d’Italia, won six stages and the GC of the Tour de France, finished 7th in the Grand Prix Cycliste de Quebec, won the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montreal, won the World Championship Road Race, won the Giro dell’Emilia, participated in the cancelled Tre Valli Varesine (officially given a “No Result”) and then won Il Lombardia.

But just how incredible was Pogacar’s 2024 season? In total, he won 25 races, 24 of which were at World Tour level (that’s more than any team managed this year). His only non-WT win was ironically, one of the few races he had not won, Emilia.

He scored 11,325 UCI points, breaking his own record (the ranking did not exist in the era of Eddy Merckx). What does that mean? He nearly doubled second place Remco (6,072) nearly tripled fifth place MVDP (4,053), scored about five times as many points as 20th-ranked Adam Yates (2,228), and 10 times as many as 66th-place Derek Gee, who is a really good rider!

His haul of points would have slotted him 11th in the UCI Team Ranking, easily securing himself a WorldTour license for the next relegation cycle (top 19 teams).

That’s all interesting and somewhat important, but there are some people who mostly care about “Great Victories,” which are considered the Grand Tours, Monuments, World Championships, and Olympics. Pogacar won five Great Victories in 2024 (Liege, Giro, Tour, Worlds, and Lombardia), all in dominating fashion, which alone would be enough to dominate the Velo d’Or competition (best cyclist in the world, as voted by journalists) and get into the debate for best season of all time.

But Pogacar won 20 races aside from Great Victories, including 12 Grand Tour stages, a “Big Seven” one-week stage race in Catalunya, a historic Italian classic in Emilia, a major World Tour one-day classic in Montreal, and podiumed MSR. His worst result of the year was in Quebec, where he finished seventh due to a tactical error and a course that does not particularly suit him.

He ticked off a lot of the achievements he wanted to this year (in fact, the only one he did not was MSR), and I’ll analyze in the next piece what he ought to target in 2025.

For now, we know he’s the greatest cyclist of all time. At this point, it’s only a matter of what he will achieve during the rest of his career. Hopefully, a lot more.