6 conclusions from Liège-Bastogne-Liège 🇧🇪
Analysing key performances from Tadej Pogačar, his rivals, Le Court, Fenix and how the UCI points system helps the Slovenian world champion
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This week we have loads of great features for you, including an exclusive interview with Red Bull’s Head of Engineering, Dan Bigham, an in-depth teams analysis following the Spring Classics, and further interviews with Jai Hindley, Matt White and Bernie Eisel.
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Trust me, your inbox will be on fire this week, and we’re kicking off with six conclusions from Liège-Bastogne-Liège. You know the drill, the first two are free, while the rest are for paid subscribers.
I hope you have a great Monday. I’ll be back later with some of that transfer news I promised.
Daniel 🫶
Pogačar is the biggest beneficiary of the UCI points system 💯
The men’s edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège lasted 6:00:09, but in truth, one only needed to watch a handful of seconds on La Redoute to predict the outcome of the race, as Tadej Pogačar came around Neilson Powless, before soloing clear of the entire peloton. For a brief moment, it looked like a counterattack might have a chance, but within a few kilometres, it was game over, in what turned out to be a relatively drab end to a Spring Classics campaign full of sensational highlights.
To some, what Pogačar is achieving right now has diluted the excitement in the sport; his dominance and consistently strong performances have outshone the competition, reducing several races to a procession and a battle for the minor places. However, this season has still produced some incredible moments, and it’s worth remembering that, despite all of the Slovenian’s success, he still failed to win Milan-San Remo, Amstel Gold Race, and Paris-Roubaix. He is beatable.
The record for Pogačar still speaks for itself, with the Slovenian becoming the first rider to ever be on the podium in six straight Monuments as he added a third Liège of his career, and a ninth Monument in total. What Pogačar has achieved this season is truly unbelievable.
And while this shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of him - he’s paid handsomely to win bike races - his power and authority also can kill an element that sport relies on: entertainment.
But he’s not entirely to blame for this, and one could conceivably argue that the UAE Team Emirates-ERG rider is the biggest beneficiary of the current UCI points system.
Take Liège, for instance. Teams know they can't follow when Pogačar attacks, and instead of burning up their domestiques or second-level leaders in a futile chase, they instead play the numbers game, hold back, and try to score UCI points through collective strength.
We saw that with Lidl-Trek, who populated half the top-six and, to some extent, Astana. If you saw an Astana rider in the top ten during the last few climbs, you have better eyesight than me, but then we saw Simone Velasco sprint to fourth and secure 440 valuable UCI points.
The battle for the top spot in the UCI teams ranking is immaterial for most fans. We don’t care, and this season the fight for the top is already over because Visma-Lease a Bike haven’t been able to keep pace with UAE. That said, teams will tell their sponsors at the start of each season that a top-five or a top-10 finish is conceivable, and sponsors, who don’t watch every moment of every race like we do, get giddy over condensed rankings they can show their superiors at the end of every quarter.
That, along with the relegation fight, massively affects racing and, as a result, how squads face the challenge of Pogačar. He will win no matter what points system the UCI cobbles together, but the current incarnation certainly helps the world champion in one-day situations like this.
And as for whether what we’re seeing from Pogačar has verged from brilliance to boredom, hold fire on that for now. He is in a league of his own, but we all thought we had a contest on our hands until Remco Evenepoel crumbled, and what we saw in Milan-San Remo, Amstel, and Roubaix were some of the best contests we’ve seen in years.
Accepting defeat and pragmatic tactics 🤷♂️
Responsibility for the race's outcome needs to be shared, and I’m still unsure how to react to the rest of the peloton's approach to Liège. It’s complicated.
Ahead of the Ardennes, we highlighted the possibility, or hope, of teams attempting different tactics, following the blueprint seen in Il Lombardia 2024, when several major threats were sent up the road early to disrupt the race's pattern and prevent an inevitable Pogačar steamroll. It didn’t work that time, but the race pattern at least gave the world champion something to think about.
On Sunday, we didn’t see anything like that, with only Bahrain putting a potential rider of interest up the road through Jack Haig. The team were also willing to try and set the race alight with Pello Bilbao putting in a significant surge with 74km to go, but other than that, and Ineos’s suicide mission with Jungels and Foss - every other team seemed content to race for second place.
Soudal Quick-Step set the pace early on, Lidl-Trek joined in at times, and UAE Team Emirates, who would have wanted a hard race from the gun, were allowed to take large portions of rest at various points in the action. Their rivals did their work for them, and when Pogačar did eventually attack, he still had two teammates with him. He didn’t even have to get out of the saddle.
At no point did Pogačar have to hunt down a threat, and at no point did we see any other favourites take a risk. It seemed there was an acceptance that Pogačar would ride away from everyone. You can link this situation to the argument about the points system above, and it was clear that some teams were hoping that the Slovenian would create a gap and then not maintain it, as he did at Amstel. However, his performance in La Flèche Wallonne and the fact that he had a few extra days to recover from the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix always meant that such a scenario was unlikely.
While I think it’s fair to ask questions and debate tactics, I also don’t subscribe to some of the extreme sentiments that appear on social media, where individuals readily throw riders and teams under the bus with tactical hot takes devised only to generate engagement, or this peculiar ideology that suggests riders and tactics can be controlled by the click of a button or the scroll of a mouse. This isn’t a computer game, and most teams would unquestionably settle for second or third when Pogačar is on the start line of Liège. That might not appease your or my desire for an exciting race, but beating Pogačar requires circumstances and luck that cannot be manufactured when the race is this hard.
In reality, riders are limited in what they can achieve on a course such as Liege. You can’t go earlier than on La Redoute because it’s almost impossible to gain more than a minute if you’re a contender. From about 70 or 80km to go, the pace never slows because riders are constantly fighting for position at that point, and on the climbs themselves, the peloton will always race at a brisk tempo.
The best case scenario for Jungels and Foss when they went clear with around 125km remaining was that they rode up to the early break and collaborated with whoever was left. Ineos clearly thought they could make contact and that if they could maintain an advantage of around one minute before La Redoute, they’d be in a strong position for the final. But this was a perfect example of how the pace in Liege never drops once the peloton hits the climbs. The design of the course means there’s no other way of racing Liege, which again falls into Pogačar’s hands.