The pro scene is certainly a busy one after a last flurry of news in early November. Even the holiday photos and end-of-season soundbites are drying up as we edge nearer to photos of lifeless Christmas trees propped up in the living rooms of Andorran and Monegasque apartments next month.
With that in mind, let’s switch things up and look back on 2025 through a wishful lens.
What do I mean by that? Well, we’re going to see what the 2025 season would have looked like if Tadej Pogačar were somehow abducted by aliens and removed from the pro peloton. Specifically, who would the chief beneficiaries be in a Pog-less world?
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For starters, somewhat surprisingly it wouldn’t have massively affected UAE Team Emirates’s dominance of the 2025 calendar. Yes, they wouldn’t have overtaken HTC-Columbia’s landmark tally of 85 victories in 2009, but the squad would still have comfortably topped the UCI team rankings even without Pogi’s seismic 11,680-point haul. In fact, they’d still be 7,000 points clear of second placed Visma-Lease a Bike.
It would, however, have massively improved Jonas Vingegaard’s season return, leaving him as the star of the season. The Dane would have completed a Chris Froome-like sweep of the Critérium du Dauphiné, Tour de France and the Vuelta a España.
On top of these major GC victories, the Visma leader would have picked up an additional five stage victories at both the Tour and the Dauphiné. His year would have also included a nine-day stint in the yellow jersey and another polka-dot jersey to add to his newly refurbished wardrobe back home in northern Denmark. With what would have been his fourth Tour success in a Pogačar-less universe, the former fish processor would have been well on track to enter the elite club of legends with five Tour titles.
Speaking of the Tour de France, Oscar Onley would have jumped onto the final podium in Paris in third place overall, while Mathieu van der Poel would have added another stage victory to his haul on Stage 4’s uphill finish in Rouen. A better opening week you’d be hard-pressed to find.
If it weren’t for Pogačar, Van der Poel would have also added a fourth Tour of Flanders title to his name, making him the most successful to have ever graced that event. Paris-Roubaix would have also been something of a damp squib without the world champion’s presence, with Van der Poel sailing away to a barnstorming victory two and a half minutes ahead of second place Mads Pedersen, who would have been joined on the podium by Wout van Aert (who would also have been promoted to third in Flanders).
Xavier Pereyron
Looking deeper into the calendar, Remco Evenepoel’s fortunes in the latter part of the season would have looked very different. Instead of effectively looking like the Slovenian’s understudy, Evenepoel would have stepped up to claim an historic World and European Championship double in the autumn. This would have been topped off with a Monument victory at Il Lombardia, giving the Belgian the same late-year triple as Pogačar notched up in reality.
The Belgian would have led the Tour de France for four days during the opening week too, but Pogačar’s absence would likely have had no effect on Evenepoel’s tumultuous abandon in the Pyrenees in week two – although this could have made it far more dramatic for us at home.
The only solace for the underdogs would have come in the Classics. Without Pogačar, chances are Liège-Bastogne-Liège would have been tamed by either Giulio Ciccone or Ben Healy. Since Astana’s Simone Velasco finished in fourth in La Doyenne, we could assume that he’d slip into third place.
Tom Pidcock would also be a happy bunny. He’d have bagged a second Strade Bianche title and been spared the humiliation of getting dropped by a ripped-up and bloodstained Pogačar on a March afternoon in Italy. That would have been quite the way for Pidcock to announce himself at his glitzy new squad Q36.5.
One thing that becomes clear in this exercise in rewriting history is that even in a Pog-less world, we’d still be clutching at straws when it comes to new names. Vingegaard would have taken the mantle of Grand Tour dominator himself, Van der Poel would have looked near untouchable in one-day races, and Evenepoel would still have lit the fire in the hearts of Belgian fans.
Indeed, Pogačar aside we’d still be looking at the same old faces, which suggests that the top end of pro cycling isn’t so much a one-man show as a barbershop quartet of superstars who leave little room for others to break through.
Perhaps the moral of the story here is that the Slovenian is far from the only culprit when it comes to the sport being predictable at the highest level. He’s just better at it than the best of the rest.
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