“His training’s started well”: Tadej Pogačar obliterates famous Strava KOM – with help of lightning-fast UAE Team Emirates train – during 205km, five-and-a-half-hour winter ride

How do you cap one of the greatest cycling seasons – if not the greatest – of all time? By going and smashing one of the sport’s most hotly contested Strava KOMs, that’s how.

In news that will surely leave anyone daring enough to challenge Tadej Pogačar’s supremacy in 2025 quaking in their cycling shoes, on Friday the world champion did more than just blow off the winter cobwebs – he practically obliterated them, smashing the iconic benchmark Strava KOM on the Coll de Rates by a stunning, mind-bending 17 seconds.

While a mere speedbump compared to the monstrous high-altitude tests tackled by Pogačar at the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, the Coll de Rates has acquired a special status within cycling in recent years, thanks to its location on the road out of Parcent, near the training camp hotspot of Calpe on Spain’s Costa Blanca, and with it the intense fight to claim the climb’s fastest recorded time on Strava.

> Was Tadej Pogačar’s staggeringly dominant 2024 the perfect season? We rank cycling’s greatest individual years, from Burton and Coppi to Vos and Pogačar

A young Jonas Vingegaard, then riding for Continental team ColoQuick, grabbed the cycling world’s attention – and that of his future Visma-Lease a Bike team – back in 2018 when he snatched the KOM with a time of 13:02 on the 6.5km effort.

Since then, Pogačar’s UAE teammate Juan Ayuso has worn the crown, just days before Tom Pidcock took it off him… only to promptly delete his Strava file, because that particular Rates record was achieved with the not so insubstantial help of some motorpacing.

Then in March this year, ColoQuick returned for another tilt at Rates glory, as Ineos-bound Peter Øxenberg Hansen secured a KOM-worthy time of 12:38.

But all that effort was today obliterated, when three-time Tour winner Pogačar – 60km into what turned out to be a 205km, five-and-a-half-hour ride with his UAE colleagues – blitzed his way up the iconic climb to put the KOM debate, perhaps once and for all, to bed.

According to the 26-year-old’s Strava file for Friday’s ride, titled ‘Going home’, Pogačar – as part of a lightning-fast team effort – covered the 6.43km climb, with its steady, consistent 5.5 per cent gradient, in a mind-boggling time of 12:21, at an average speed of 31.2kph.

And if you’re struggling to visualise just how fast that is, two lucky amateurs were able to capture the UAE rocket ship in action, rainbow jersey firmly attached:

Live images of 🇸🇮 Tadej Pogacar's successful Coll de Rates KOM attack! 🚀

🎬 Alexander Depoorter pic.twitter.com/dnLne5oVaS

— Domestique (@Domestique___) December 20, 2024

Pogi’s rivals – be afraid, be very afraid.

And with the Vuelta a España out to woo the Triple Crown winner with a Pogačar-friendly route featuring time trials and the iconic Angliru, Friday’s record-smashing ride may prove to be just a prelude to some more Spanish excellence from the Slovenian next summer.

After his breakthrough ride at the Vuelta in 2019, Pogačar has avoided the Spanish grand tour, but with a possible tilt at a Tour-Vuelta double on the cards for 2025, UAE team manager Joxean Fernández Matxin has indicated that the world champion is keen to nab the only grand tour missing from his palmares.

“It’s a race route with a genuine Vuelta feel,” Matxin told AS after Thursday’s route reveal. “Those ten summit finishes, five or six really mountainous stages, two time trials.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by UAE Team Emirates🇦🇪 (@uae_team_emirates)

“I will talk with Tadej from my hotel and we’ll decide. What we know for certain already is that any race he takes part in is guaranteed to be spectacular, and inside the team, we've more or less got a good idea [of what he will race].

“The Vuelta is a race in which he will participate, sooner or later, because we want to try to be sure that he has the Vuelta in his palmares.”

If he continues riding in the same way he’s done throughout 2024, including right up to Christmas, that Vuelta win will surely be only a matter of time…