As. With almost insolent superiority, Tadej Pogacar won his fourth consecutive Giro de Lombardia on Saturday in Como, equaling Fausto Coppi‘s record, after a new individual exhibition with which to put the finishing touch to a monumental season.
The Slovenian attacked 48.5 kilometers from the finish to claim his 25th victory in 2024 alone, his second in a ‘Monument’ this year after Liège-Bastogne-Liège, with more than three minutes ahead of Remco Evenepoel.
Only the Italian rider Alessandro Pettacci had won so much in a season in the 21st century.
“Every victory is special, the team worked so hard, we had a lot of pressure. We followed the planned plan, I am very happy,” Pogacar reacted, admitting that he had “started to think about vacations” in the last kilometers.
As the peloton expected and feared, the current world champion, widely acclaimed at the start from Bergamo, attacked on the complicated climb to the Sormano pass after a long relief from his teammate in the UAE team Pavel Sivakov.
Pogacar accelerated just at the moment when the group of favorites caught the last survivors of the first morning breakaway, made up of about twenty runners.
As soon as it began, the show was over, with the same script that has been seen so many times in recent months, and no one even tried to follow the Slovenian, who consequently quickly achieved a comfortable cushion.
Like Coppi… and Merckx
He reached the top with more than a minute ahead of his first pursuers and increased that time even more in the last forty kilometers, winning with more than three minutes ahead of Evenepoel, in what is the Belgian’s first podium in Lombardy.
Third was the Italian Guilio Ciccone, 4 minutes 31 seconds behind Pogacar.
This new consecutive victory in the classic dead leaves allows him to match what was achieved by Very champion Fausto Coppi between 1946 and 1949 and sealed one of the most legendary seasons in the history of cycling.
Winner of the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, the World Championship, the Volta a Catalunya, the Giro de Emilia, the Strade Bianche, the Montreal Grand Prix and two Monumentsthe 26-year-old Slovenian has won nine of the 11 events in which he has participated in 2024, to which we must add 16 stage victories.
Pogacar is the only rider to have won the Tour, the Giro, the World Championship and at least one in the same year. Monumentnickname given to the five most important classics on the calendar (Milan-San Remo, Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Giro de Lombardia).
A devastating dominance that is comparable to that exercised by the Cannibal Eddy Merckx.
The Slovenian ogre cemented most of his victories thanks to long solo escapes, devastating for his rivals, such as the last 81 kilometers of the Strade Bianche or the attack 100 kilometers from the finish line in the World Championships.
But their supremacy inevitably arouses suspicion in a sport often plagued by doping. Pogacar assures that these practices belong to other times and believes that current cycling is a “victim of its past”, as he repeated on Friday.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘
fbq(‘init’, ‘133913093805922’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘Contact’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘Donate’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘FindLocation’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘Lead’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘Search’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘Subscribe’, {value: ‘0.00’, currency: ‘MXN’, predicted_ltv: ‘0.00’});
fbq(‘track’, ‘ViewContent’);
#Tadej #Pogacar #wins #fourth #consecutive #Giro #Lombardia
–
