Dubai: World champion Tadej Pogacar is looking for a perfect finish as he spearheads a strong UAE Team Emirates in the final monument of the season — Il Lombardia, on Saturday.
Pogacar will be entering the race on the back of his first win in the rainbow stripes at the Giro dell’Emilia, setting himself up perfectly to end the season on a high in Lombardy. The riders will battle it out over 252 km from Bergamo to the scenic Como. The last of the five monuments on the calendar will provide ferocious racing with 4,800 metres of climbing, pushing the riders to their limits. The famous Colma di Sormano (13.1 km at 6.5 per cent) with 45 km to go could be a decisive moment in the race. The demanding climb will provide the explosive Pogacar a golden opportunity to launch one of his trademark attacks.
Pogacar is no stranger to one-day racing, delivering iconic performances throughout his career with notable wins at Strade Bianche, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and most recently at the World Championships in Zurich, where he demonstrated once again that he is the premier cyclist on the planet with a 100 km solo attack to take the World Champion jersey.
Aiming for historic fourth title
The fifth and final monument of the 2024 season, ‘The Race of the Falling Leaves,’ has produced a handful of Pogacar’s standout performances, with the Slovenian superstar securing victory in the last three editions of the race. After what has been an extraordinary season, Pogacar will be looking to secure a fourth successive Il Lombardia title.
“It’s been an amazing season and I want nothing more than to finish it off in the best way possible. My first outing as World Champion at Giro dell’Emilia couldn’t have gone better, to take my first win in that jersey is something I won’t forget. I can’t wait for Il Lombardia. Every day that you wear the rainbow jersey you need to prove you are still the best. I have an amazing team behind me and think we have a great chance of winning again.”
Making history
Slovenian superstar Pogacar wrote himself into the history books last month when he was crowned world champion for the first time. That triumph in Zurich made him just the third man to win the rainbow jersey, the Tour de France, and the Giro d’Italia in the same year, matching Stephen Roche and Eddy Merckx.
Now Pogacar is preparing to match Fausto Coppi’s quadruple between 1946 and 1949 at the Race of the Falling Leaves in northern Italy, the end-of-season special, which he has won in increasingly spectacular style each passing year, adding to his illustrious Triple Crown and five one-day wins in 2024.
Strong competition ahead
UAE Team Emirates’ quest for history will be pushed to the limit by a remarkably strong field of opponents. INEOS Grenadier rider Tom Pidcock will aim to have a big say in the outcome of the race. After a fine start to the season winning Amstel Gold, the Briton will be aiming to hit top form once again after battling through illness and injury this season.
Double Olympic gold medalist Remco Evenepoel will set his sights on adding to his one-day palmarès, which already includes two monument wins at Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2022 and 2023. The Belgian, who will be donning his new golden bike, has had some monumental battles with Pogacar in recent years, which fans can expect to see more of on Saturday.
UAE Team Emirates enter Il Lombardia on the verge of rewriting cycling’s record books, with 80 wins already this season as they close in on the 85-win milestone set by Columbia-HTC in 2009. Leading the charge is none other than Tadej Pogacar, the undoubted King of the Peloton. Pogacar will be looking to claim win number 81 for the team—and a staggering 25th for himself—as they continue their relentless pursuit of greatness.
Evenepoel: A potential obstacle
The only rider in the peloton who seems capable of denying Pogacar is Evenepoel, who will return to the site of his horror crash from four years ago. Belgian Evenepoel suffered a fractured pelvis after crashing over a low wall at the Muro di Sormano and falling nine meters (30 feet), an injury that kept him out of action until the following year’s Giro d’Italia.
The 24-year-old has had a superb season of his own, with Paris Olympic golds in the road race and time trial and a successful defense of his world time trial title last month, as well as an impressive podium finish at the Tour.
“He looks good and very motivated,” Soudal-Quick Step team manager Davide Bramati told the Gazzetta dello Sport. “He could have just stayed at home after the worlds given everything that he’s won this year, but he’s got a lot of determination and he wants to give it a go.”
However, Evenepoel dropped out of last weekend’s Giro dell’Emilia — inevitably won by Pogacar — with an eye problem, and a low placing at the Coppa Bernocchi warm-up race on Monday suggests that he might not be in the right form to stop his rival from adding another major win to a long—and still growing—list.
— With inputs from AFP
