For three years now, the cycling media has told you the same story about Tadej Pogačar. He's a freak of nature. The watts are otherworldly. The rest of us are watching a different species, and there's nothing to learn because you can't learn genetics. It's a tidy story, and it lets everyone off the hook — Pogačar for being inexplicable, the rest of us for being mortal.
Andy McGrath spent two years researching the man, and he came back with a more interesting and more useful account. McGrath isn't a hot-take merchant; he's a former editor of Rouleur and one of the more thoughtful long-form writers in the sport. And his core argument, which he laid out on the podcast, is that the freak narrative isn't just lazy — it's wrong in ways that actually matter to anyone who races a bike, at any level.
The numbers that puncture the myth
McGrath's first move is to put Pogačar in historical context, and the context is humbling for the hype.
"Pogy only averages 55 race days a year," he pointed out. "That's what I worked out. And Merckx's hallowed win number is 525. He'd have to win every race for 10 years to beat him." It's a deflating little calculation, and it's meant to be. The modern era treats Pogačar as a rider beyond comparison, but he races a relatively light, carefully managed programme — around 55 days against the brutal, sprawling calendars the old greats rode. He is extraordinary. He is also operating in a completely different, far more protected context than the Merckx standard he's measured against, and the raw-dominance framing flattens all of that away.
This matters because the freak story depends on Pogačar being a discontinuity — something the sport has never seen and can't account for. Place him properly in history and he becomes something more comprehensible: a phenomenal rider, yes, but one whose record is shaped by how, when and how often he chooses to race, not just by an engine that defies explanation.
He's been out-thought — and beaten
The most important thing McGrath said, though, was about the 2022 Tour de France, because it demolishes the idea that the strongest watts simply win.
That year, McGrath argued, Pogačar's team were "out-intelligenced by Jumbo-Visma, pure and simple." They didn't see it coming. And he went further: on paper, Pogačar's team that year weren't even a Tour-winning outfit — by the numbers they were behind, and arguably shouldn't have won it. Jumbo-Visma took the race not with bigger engines but with better tactics, coordinated aggression and a plan Pogačar's side couldn't answer in the moment.
Read that back, because it's the opposite of the freak story. The best rider in the world, on a day his physiology was intact, lost a Grand Tour to a smarter race. Tactics beat watts. And it's not a one-off: McGrath noted that even now, with Jonas Vingegaard putting out some of the best numbers of his career — better than ever, by his own account — he still can't always beat Pogačar. The margins at the very top aren't decided by who can produce the highest figure in a lab. They're decided by racecraft, positioning, timing and the intelligence to use an engine well. This is the same truth our breakdown of the science of climbing at Tour de France speeds keeps running into: the watts are necessary, but they're not the whole story.
Why this matters for you
Here's the turn, and it's the reason this isn't just café talk. The freak narrative is quietly corrosive for amateurs, because it tells you the things that decide bike races are genetic and therefore none of your business. McGrath's account says the opposite, and it's far more useful.
The parts of Pogačar's success that the freak story ignores — the racecraft, the positioning, the tactical reading of a race, the instinct for when to commit and when to wait — are exactly the parts that are trainable for ordinary riders. You will never have Pogačar's VO2 max. You can absolutely get better at being in the right place at the right time, at timing your efforts, at not burning your matches in the first hour, at racing your head as well as your legs. Those are skills, and skills are learned. The 2022 Tour proved that a smarter race beats a stronger one even at the very top; in your local road race or sportive, where the fitness gaps are smaller and the tactical errors larger, racecraft is worth even more.
It's the through-line of how the best riders actually prepare, which is why we keep returning to it in pieces like what amateurs can learn from Tour de France preparation and our look at how the 2026 contenders build a season. The engine gets the headlines. The intelligence wins the races.
None of this is to pretend the engine doesn't matter — it plainly does, and Pogačar's is one of the best the sport has seen. The point is one of proportion. The media tells a story that is 100% physiology, because physiology is simple to dramatise and impossible to argue with. McGrath's research restores the missing half: the tactics, the teamwork, the timing, the schedule. And it happens that the missing half is the half you can actually do something about. Nobody can train you a new VO2 max ceiling overnight, but anybody can learn to stop wasting their existing one. That's not a consolation prize. On the evidence of the 2022 Tour, it's how races are won.
What "racecraft" actually means for an amateur
It's easy to nod along to "racecraft matters" and still have no idea what to practise on Saturday. So it's worth making it concrete, because the tactical edges McGrath credits in Pogačar have direct, smaller-scale versions in amateur racing.
The first is positioning. Most of the energy an amateur wastes in a road race or a hard group ride is spent fighting to move up at the worst possible moments — surging round the outside into a climb, closing gaps that opened because they drifted back on the flat. Being near the front before it matters, so you're not spending matches to get there when it does, is the single most transferable thing in the sport. Pogačar's team failed exactly this collective version of it in 2022; you fail the individual version of it every time you hit the bottom of a climb boxed in at the back.
The second is timing. Knowing when to commit an effort and when to sit is a skill built through reps and attention, not genetics. The rider who attacks into a headwind section, or burns themselves chasing a move that was always going to come back, has lost to physics and patience, not to watts. The third is energy management — treating your day's effort as a budget, the way our pacing and periodisation thinking treats a season. None of these require a World Tour engine. All of them are learnable, and all of them decide races at every level below the one Pogačar rides.
The lesson hiding in 55 race days
There's one more thing worth stealing from the Pogačar story, and it's buried in that number McGrath kept returning to: 55 race days a year. The best rider in the world doesn't race himself into the ground. His programme is curated, his peaks are deliberate, and the rest is recovery and preparation.
Plenty of amateurs do the opposite. They race or smash every weekend, chase every Strava segment, and treat rest as time wasted. The result is a permanent state of being slightly tired and never quite sharp. Pogačar's calendar is a quiet argument for the thing amateurs find hardest: doing less, but doing it fresh, and saving yourself for the days that matter. The freak does fewer race days than your club captain. That alone should tell you something.
The takeaway
McGrath's two years of research land on something the cycling media rarely says: the greatest rider of his generation is not an unaccountable miracle. He's a brilliant athlete with a managed programme, a sharp tactical brain and a supporting cast — and he's been out-thought and beaten by riders who raced smarter on the day.
That should change how you watch him, and how you race. Stop treating the watts as the whole story. Start watching what Pogačar does with them — where he sits in the bunch, when he goes, how he reads the move before it happens. That's the part you can steal. The genetics were never the lesson. The racecraft always was.
Hear Andy McGrath's full breakdown of Pogačar on the Roadman podcast. For the training side, read Pogačar's training secrets, and talk tactics with the community on Skool.