In the background, those skyscrapers born from architects’ nightmares threatening the placid Mediterranean. They are the background of the set and also the metaphor of the UAE, which welcomes the press from all over the world in several rooms of an empty luxury hotel in winter to announce its next season just as a multinational Hollywood distributor would do presenting its latest blockbuster, stars competing for media attention, some supporting characters sneaking into a table, telling how they combine their ambitions, and their patience, with so much. number oney Then Superstar Pogacar above all, and with it the new paradigm of cycling.
More brilliant, luminous and even wiser, turning 27, and aware, at last, alas, of the passage of time that flows accelerated, unstoppable, of its weight in the history of cycling, and the uneven hair of cuts, as if cut by bites. “I think after all these years and all these victories, I’m starting to realize that we are doing something big,” he admits. “I enjoy doing it. I hope we don’t stop writing this book.”
And the world champion enjoys his ability to write it in his own way, without competing with anyone, guided only by his desires, which, as he already stressed in the last week of the last edition, do not always involve adding more Tours de France than any other, and when faced with the situation of choosing – or the Tour de France, which one would you choose, and it is not worth saying both -, he responds without hesitation, and quickly. “I think I would choose Roubaix because I have already won the Tour four times and if you win four or five times it is not a big deal,” he says, giving up, in fact and for the first time in the afternoon, to enter into competition with the historical pantheon of the large loopAnquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain, five-time winners. “I think there is more difference between zero and one than between four and five.”
After this noisy preamble, no one is surprised that when he recites his calendar, the Slovenian one, the first two months of his 2026, March and April, are dedicated exclusively to the Monuments, starting with the Strade Bianche candidate (March 7), and then San Remo, Flanders, Roubaix and Liège. In May and June, two races of a few days in Switzerland (Romandie, six days; and Tour of Switzerland, five), in which he has never raced, and in July, the Tour. Then, in September, the World Cup in Montreal.
But Roubaix first of all, and he already stopped by the Carrefour de l’Arbre three days ago to feel the feel of the pavés and test their bicycles, tires, wheels… He wants it so much. To win Roubaix he will need to gain a couple of kilos, he calculates, and “work on durability”, the new totem word of cycling, something like resistance to lifelong fatigue and also some metabolism, nutrition and training to increase the ability to maintain critical speed, which he does by repeating intense series at the end of training.
The plan, which reproduces almost 100 percent, with some lightening, the one that followed in 2025, 60 days of racing at most, reveals a certain urgency to fill in empty boxes in his history, he, who Monuments has won all, and several times, except San Remo and Roubaix, and of one-week WorldTour tests he only lacks the Tour of the Basque Country, incompatible due to dates with his thirst for monuments cobbled, and the two Swiss springs. “If I win, if I ever win these two races [Roubaix y San Remo] So yes, I would more or less think that there is not much left for me to do, but there is always something more, there are many one-week races that I have not participated in yet and also the Vuelta,” he says. “There are many things left to win, and different ones, in different scenarios, but the years go by very quickly and I may not have time to win everything that is left… But I just like to go back to these races and try to win because I have not won, but I am not obsessed with it as some might think.”
He only needed to say, to make it clear, that he is not, nor does he want to be, the cannibal Eddy Merckx, with whom he is so often compared, nor does he want his greed, his selfishness. A few minutes before Pogacar, the South African Boer Jeroen Swart, the team’s performance director, and Pogacar’s personal trainer, the Sevillian Javier Sola from Alcalá de Guadaira, had passed by the set, and both agreed that yes, the cyclist touched by the magic wand called Pogacar has the physiological capacity to win the Giro, Tour and Vuelta in the same year. “It all depends on your motivation to do it,” Sola clarifies, and Pogacar also says that of course he can do it, but that he is not subjugated by the idea. “It wouldn’t be fair for me to participate in all three, because we have runners that anyone can win,” he says bluntly. “I shouldn’t obsess over these things, I don’t want to be anxious about everything. I don’t need, I don’t want that and I prefer to see João, Isaac or Adam fighting for the general classification as well and give opportunities to the young people who arrive. I don’t need to be, I don’t know how to say it… just think about myself and my results. That doesn’t lead anywhere.” And the runners who pass by the stage announce their schedule. João Almeida will ride as Giro and Vuelta leader, and the Mexican phenomenon Isaac del Toro will relieve the Portuguese from Caldas da Rainha as his lieutenant in the Tour. “I will like to continue learning alongside the best,” agrees the Mexican, second in the last Giro, just turned 22 years old. And Joxean Matxin, the team director, explains that it is not a demotion. “We do it to protect you,” he says. “He would suffer tremendous pressure in Mexico if we sent him as leader to the Giro.”
The stars disappear from the rooms when the sun disappears and the skyscrapers disappear in the mist, and the bar is filled with team assistants, dozens of them, who bring to life the blood family image that Pogacar sometimes uses. And its sentimental truth surpasses the fiction of marketing when everyone gets excited and shouts a toast to Joseba Elguezabal, the lifelong masseuse who cried and made the Slovenian champion cry when he announced recently that he was leaving the team to go to Athletic. And in Benidorm he says goodbye.
