Are we tired of it yet?

The Pogačar Complex

I am sitting in the Royal Library of Belgium, one of my favourite buildings in the world, and I’m wondering if I even have the will to ask this question. But, are we tiring of Pogačar?

Spoiler alert: I don’t know the answer. This blog is simply by way of exploring our feelings on the subject, and reaching no firm conclusion. Unless of course I manage to argue myself into a position one way or another by the time I have planted the final full stop onto the end of this collection of characters, and sent its digital record into the cloud, where it will remain for all time, or until someone turns off all the power in the planet, which might be sooner than any of us think. And at that point, it might seem a trivial discussion; to ask whether or not the brilliance of one rider is detrimental to the experience of watching road racing.

Incidentally, I have already lost one “argument” this morning, although I hesitate to use that word, because it was conducted with faultless politesse on both sides. It happened after I breezed into the main reading room at the library, scanning my reader’s card as I did so. There was a rather negative-sounding “beep”, and the concierge sent me down to reception, telling me that there was an unspecified problem with my membership.

At reception, they told me that it had expired. I would need to re-register. This required me to present my press card, which was problematic, as I no longer have one, for long and boring reasons. In fact, I haven’t had one for years, and so I wondered how I’d managed to get access in the first instance. I put it to the receptionist that this seemed odd. She agreed, but held her line, despite me looking pleadingly at her. My membership lapsed, I had no choice but to take a seat in the general public area in the central lobby, where there is a freezing blast of cold air every time the main doors open, and the bloke opposite me is eating a big jar of granola and crunching loudly.

For the last hour or so, I have been writing a fairly large number of postcards to members of the “1923 Club”. I do these by hand, when I am on my travels. And by the time I write the last one (sorry, Tracey) my handwriting is almost illegible. So, it comes as a relief to be tapping away at the keyboard now instead.

The sights and sounds of yesterday’s race are still very vivid in my recent memory. In fact, dozing off on the implausibly ponderous series of trains I took from Ninove to Brussels this morning, I could still hear the whistle blasts, roadside bells, hollers of delight, thud of helicopter blades and roar of the motorbikes. From a distance of no more than a foot from the Ronde van Vlaanderen I was confronted once again with that feral sense, impossible for television pictures accurately to transmit, of the actual agony of bike racing. The faces of those riders working at the front, or falling away at the back, and those sliding down through the peloton in between! The masks of pain!

And in the middle of it all, the White Knight. Tadej Pogačar, in the rainbow bands, is a wonder to behold. As he passed me on the Valkenberg, a tough little tarmac climb with 80 something kilometres remaining, he looked quite separate from the rest, apart in a space both physical and metaphysical. He is entirely different, isn’t he? He is unlike anyone I have seen race a bike before.