RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 3 sourcesLegendary commentator Sid Waddell was (almost certainly) joking when he likened darts legend Eric Bristow to Alexander the Great during the 1984 World Championships.
Bristow, the Crafty Cockney, was two-time world champion at that stage and on his way to the third of an eventual five world titles as part of a career in which he claimed 22 major tournament trophies.
"When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer," the ever-excitable Waddell sardonically squeaked in his indomitable Northumbrian tones.
Reigning two-time cycling world champion Tadej Pogačar is only 27, too.
And as he lines up for this year's Vuelta a España, which gets underway on Saturday night AEST, he is taking another step towards conquering all of men's professional cycling.
Comparing a darts player from a time when the sport was played at venues such as Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke-on-Trent, however exceptional he was, to one of antiquity's most well-known figures was intentionally incongruous from Waddell.
But doing the same to a waif-like cyclist somehow seems like less of a stretch.
Pogačar's dominance over professional cycling is near total.
So dominant is he that it's simply not a stretch to imagine the Slovenian at the head of a rampaging UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad leading the charge to conquer the Kingdom of Spain via its mountain passes.
Of course, nothing is absolute in professional cycling.
Crashes and illness could derail Pogačar's quest to add the only one of cycling's grand tours missing from his palmares.
But rarely has there ever been a rider for whom victory seems so assured as Pogačar when he hits the front of a race.
As Pogačar proved during his staggeringly dominant Tour de France victory, the rest of the field was barely given a sniff.
From the moment the Slovenian star climbed away from the only man to ever claim yellow ahead of him, Jonas Vingegaard, on the slopes of the Col du Tourmalet during stage six, only the gods of misfortune ever had a hope of ripping another triumphant Paris visit from his grasp. Mere mortals cannot hope to come close enough to land a telling blow.
So far this year, Pogačar has had 37 race days in 2026, winning 16 of them (43 per cent) as well as winning all of the three stage races he has started.
In 2025 he had 17 wins from 50 race days (34 per cent). In 2024, it was 22 wins from 58 days (38 per cent).
Victories in that time frame include three straight Tours de France, a Giro d'Italia, two world championships and a whopping eight Monument one-day races.
Such unfettered dominance is not universally acclaimed. Some of the more perniciously fickle French roadside supporters even booed Pogačar from time to time.
But some of the biggest questions have come from those who simply don't believe what they are seeing, as the curse of cycling's past looms large over the achievements of the present crop.
Pogačar's emphatic victory in this year's Tour de France was not a surprise.
But as a result of his latest success, and the success he has earned across races from the sport's greatest grand tours to the one-day classics of northern Europe, Pogačar cannot avoid being tainted by the shadows of the sport's nefarious past.
The spectre of doping hangs over cycling like an ancient curse, which is not far off given the century or more of scandals that have rocked the sport and its most iconic race .
As a result, winning the Tour de France is only part of the battle.
Winning over the sceptics is something else entirely, and an arguably far greater, perhaps even impossible, challenge.
Pogačar's riding at this year's race was filled with displays of verve and daring and free-spirited riding of the likes many had thought had been eliminated from the professional peloton since the advent of power meters and team radios.
Nothing illustrated this more than the final stage in Paris, a thrilling two-up battle with Classics rival Mathieu van der Poel that saw Pogačar pay the ultimate tribute to the jersey by relentlessly pursuing a stage win.
However, two of his five wins stand out above all others.
His sixth-stage 42-kilometre solo victory via the Col du Tourmalet was exquisite , a masterful solo attack of the like he has made his trademark since he rode himself onto the podium on stage 20 of the 2019 Vuelta a España with a similarly impressive 37km attack, which he has since repeated at the last two world championships, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Strade Bianche.
Then, his Alpe d'Huez masterclass on stage 19 was even better, as heart-stopping a spectacle as anyone in cycling has ever seen, perhaps even the greatest single display of cycling in history.
But that ride raised even more questions, as Pogačar erased a three-and-a-half minute gap on a collection of sensational climbers ahead of him and obliterated the previous record for the 13.8km ascent of Alpe d'Huez, set by Marco Pantani during the 1995 Tour de France.
Pantani's time for the ascent, 36 minutes and 40 seconds, has long been viewed with equal parts romance and scepticism.
The mid-90s were rife with drug taking in the professional peloton, with the blood-booster EPO just entering the system of the world's leading riders.
When EPO first emerged, there was no test for the drug other than to measure the percentage of blood volume made up of red blood cells.
The UCI decided that, given a percentage value of 50 per cent was at the upper limit of what a healthy adult male would have, any rider with a value above that would be sat out of a race for their own safety when tests were introduced in 1997.
That gave some riders a remit to simply top up their natural levels to be closer to that 50 per cent limit.
"If we go back to the doping era, what happened was that basically riders were getting their levels artificially raised," former Tour de France yellow jersey wearer David Millar said on the For The Love of Cycling podcast during the Tour.
"So wha...
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