Three Quick Takeaways: What Tadej Pogačar's GP Montréal Win Tells Us About the Upcoming World Championships

Breaking down how Tadej Pogačar beat Wout van Aert in Canada and what it means for the looming World Championships

Programming Note: The in-depth Vuelta GC Breakdown will come out tomorrow but before we wrap up the season’s final grand tour, I wanted to get out a few quick thoughts on Tadej Pogačar’s win on Sunday the GP Montréal since it holds a few potential keys to the World Road Race Championships.

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Tadej Pogačar’s sprint victory over Wout van Aert at this past weekend’s GP Montréal was both surprising and left us a lot to consider as we head towards an upcoming Road Race World Championships that will tackle an extremely similar course in Wollongong, Australia later this month. Below is my mini-stage notebook and three quick takeaways from the event.

Final 10km Notebook

11.8km: Ineos’ Dani Martinez attacks on a hill coming into the finale of the race. Back in the peloton, Wout van Aert runs out of teammates as his last Jumbo teammate pulls off, which forces UAE and Tadej Pogačar to respond to keep Martinez from riding clear.

11.2km: A few moments later, Pogacar and Van Aert bridge up to Martinez with Andrea Bagioli from QuickStep in tow.

10.5km: Further up on the climb, a small group has formed and we see that Martinez’s move was to set up his Ineos teammates Adam Yates, who has now attacked himself. Pogacar responds with Van Aert on his wheel, but hanging with the small climbers on the climb is putting the bigger Van Aert under immense pressure.

1km: Coming into the final kilometer, Van Aert is stuck on the front with the climbers behind knowing he has a massive advantage in the sprint and not wanting him to also take an advantageous position.

500m: Going through a ‘hot-dog’ turn, Van Aert moves out slightly to push Pogacar and David Gaudu onto the front.

300m: Gaudu, now stuck on the front, goes to the other side of the road in an attempt to push the others in front of him, but when they don’t follow, he attacks in an attempt to get an initial gap and hold it due to hesitation in the group behind. While he initially gets a gap, Pogacar doesn’t hesitate to respond behind, even with Van Aert on his wheel. Notice that the road crests slightly before going downhill to the finish line.

175m: In full sprint, Pogacar catches and blows by Gaudu, while Van Aert opens up his own sprint behind.

50m-Finish: While Van Aert should be able to win this sprint on paper, he is visibly gassed and has to sit back down while Pogacar, far fresher, can stay out of the saddle to sprint and is helped along by the downhill finish, which makes it incredibly hard to overtake a rider in front.

Three Takeaways

1) Tadej Pogacar can win the World Championships from a sprint finish

• This impressive result from Pogacar was sold as a surprise since Van Aert is one of the best sprinters in the sport and was going up against five riders with far less top-end speed and power and Pogacar is generally considered a grand tour specialist who moonlights in one-day races.

• However, knowing what we know now, perhaps this shouldn’t have been a massive surprise, since Pogacar is a quick finisher from small groups (he has won two one-day Monuments due to both his explosiveness and high level of fitness that leaves him fresher at the end of hard races).

• This win shows us that Pogacar has shaken off his post-Tour funk, and is heading to Australia with the physical and mental tools to win the upcoming road race World Championships, which are held on a similar, if not just slightly easier, course.

• But the biggest thing Pogacar will take from this win is the confidence that if the racing dynamics don’t favor late breakaway, he doesn’t have to force a move to drop riders on the World’s course and can simply follow moves and leverage his superior fitness by simply sitting and waiting in the final sprint.

2) Wout van Aert keeps lost this sprint due to being so strong that he made a front group he didn’t really belong in

• The fact that Van Aert racked up yet another loss from a small group at the end of a hard race (he hasn’t won out of a group of five riders since 2019 and leads the WorldTour with 11-second places finishes in 2022) has created plenty of nonsense noise about how Van Aert is an overrated rider and choke artist, but it is important to remember that pure speed isn’t incredibly important in small group sprints while a riders’ freshness is often the deciding factor.

• This means that while Van Aert does end up beaten from small groups on a semi-regular basis, this is oftentimes due to the fact that he is so good and versatile that he ends up in small groups on courses that a rider of his size has no business surviving.

• In short, while it was initially surprising Van Aert was beaten by Pogacar in a sprint, it is important to remember that the extremely difficult course, which featured close to 16,000 feet (4856 meters) of climbing, was much more suited to Pogacar than Van Aert, who had to give everything just to simply make the front group (for example, Michael Matthews and Greg Van Avermaet were distanced on the final climb). By the time they reached the finish line, Pogacar was far fresher and sharper (both mentally and physically) since getting up and over the endless short climbs was far less taxing for him than Van Aert.

3) Van Aert’s biggest strength in these late-race positions is his time trialing,

not sprinting ability

• It might sound slightly crazy, but in situations like that at GP Montréal, Van Aert’s best option for winning would have been to attack between the final climb and the finish line and lean on his time trialing rather than sprinting ability.

• Outside of Van Aert being a world-class time trialist who has proven he can hold off a chasing peloton to take massive road wins (i.e. stage 8 of the 2022 Tour de France), we have seen again and again in recent years that the rider who attacks first and gets out in front of the chasers is rewarded with the win. This is due to the misaligned incentives created by a solo attack, which sets up a dynamic where the rider in front only has one choice, to ride as hard as they can, while the riders behind have to sit and hope a rival decides to take up the pace since the rider to do the work to nail back the move will be too spent to actually win the race.

• This dynamic means that even if Van Aert has equal abilities in sprinting and time trialing, he would be better off attacking and attempting to win solo since once he gets a clean gap, it will be next to impossible to reel in him. Meanwhile, going to the line with the others presents far greater variability, since even if he is a strong sprinter, these small group sprints are far more of a lottery than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

• Van Aert and his Belgium team would be wise to heed this lesson when they take the road for the 2022 World Road Race Championships on September 25th