Taddei Pogachar will make his Tour de Flanders debut in 2022, winning not only the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, but also four of the five one-day monument races.
In addition to winning the yellow jersey for the second year in a row, he also won Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia, becoming only the third rider in history to win the Tour and two monuments in the same season.
Pogachar's race program will be decided at the UAE Team Emirates gathering in Italy this week, but he has said he will "almost certainly" compete in Milan-San Remo and Liège in the spring as well as Flanders and Lombardia in the fall.
The only monument is Paris-Roubaix, but he plans to target another major one-day event at the World Championships in Australia at the end of the season. After that, he has two Grand Tours in a row until spring, when he will contest his third Tour title before preparing to return to the Vuelta.
"The start will be the same as this year, opening the season with the UAE Tour, which is very important for the team," Pogachar told Slovenian media after being named Slovenia's Sportsman of the Year. [With the exception of Paris-Roubaix, the team will also compete in four Monuments, two Grand Tours, and possibly the World Championships. It's going to be a pretty hard season and the Tour of Slovenia is on the schedule."
Pogachar's Flanders debut on April 3 is highly anticipated, as it will be his first race on cobbles. While the course is suited to the classics, the 23-year-old Pogachar has all-around ability, as Julian Alaphilippe, Vincenzo Nibali, and Alejandro Valverde have all played eye-catching cameos on the cobblestones in recent years.
Pogachar did not seem to be tempted until Paris-Roubaix, despite the cobbled sections that characterized the "Hell of the North" being a key part of stage 9 of this year's Tour de France.
Next year's Paris-Roubaix will be held a week later than usual, the weekend before La Flèche Wallonne and Liège, two of Pogachar's major goals. Still, Pogachar will no doubt take advantage of Flanders' proximity to Roubaix to scout out the pavé he will encounter in July.
As for his Grand Tour ambitions, Pogachar will compete in two Tours in one season for the first time; in his first season as a professional in 2019, he competed in the Vuelta, winning three stages before finishing third overall, then in 2020 and 2021 He won the Tour de France.
Pogachar will join his UAE Team Emirates teammates at a training camp in northern Italy on Thursday. This is a preliminary gathering and training will be intensified in further camps in January.
"We are hoping for the same season or better, but we are not expecting it," Pogachar said.
"Even at my best, I can always look for a reserve. I'm working like me and obviously it's paying off."
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