2023-07-12 23:10:58
A week after astonishing the world in the Tour of Flanders with a historic exhibition that will always be remembered by winning the monument of monuments, the hardest and most difficult pavé classic on the cycling calendar, Tadej Pogacar continued with his routine as always. As if nothing had happened. Get up, have breakfast, get dressed as a cyclist and hit the road. To train to prepare the following objectives, which were going to be the classics of the Ardennes. The Amstel Gold Race, the Fleche Wallonne, and the Liège. When you get home from riding, also the usual: download the day’s route and send it directly to your coach, Iñigo San Millán, who is from Álava, from the beautiful town of Laguardia but lives in Denver, the capital of Colorado, in the USA. .UU The technician couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “A brutal progression. He did not stop improving ”, he says.
“I immediately caught a plane and went to Monaco, at his house. He was having some spectacular numbers, well above what he is used to, which is already exceptional”. San Millán hallucinated. “I wanted to see it with my own eyes, do several stress tests because he was training at certain levels…”. He spent five days with the cycling star. “What I wanted, above all, was for him not to overtrain for the Tour. Check on him and make sure everything was going well.” I was going. Ten days later he won two of the three Ardennes classics: the Amstel and the Fleche. In the third, Liège, he fell and everything was cut short. Pogacar broke his wrist and all the alarms went off. Would he arrive in time for the Tour?
His privileged body, and his brain, which is Iñigo San Millán, took care of that. The man from Alava, head of performance for UAE Emirates, is also his personal trainer, in addition to Juan Ayuso’s. He works with the best. And also, part of his earnings from the cycling team goes to his research project to find a cure for cancer. His work is far from the cameras, but it is the basis of everything. He operates from across the pond and comes to Europe especially for team rallies. In one of them, the one prior to the Tour in Sestriere, he was able to verify that his boy was ready and ready. Recovered from breakage.
“There I saw an important change in him, we had been in the Sierra Nevada first and in the French Alps later. Little by little I was improving, but in Sestriere, in mid-June I really noticed the progression. From there he came out very well, finer, with good feelings and very happy ”. San Millán does not speak of numbers. He is forbidden. “We want to be cautious, I prefer not to say anything, although I have them here,” he points to his pants pocket, where he keeps his mobile phone.
He does not hide that, as a good brain, he not only looks at his runner, he also studies his greatest rival closely. To Jonas Vingegaard: “Of course. We are always thinking to see what numbers the Jumbo have. For example, in the Dauphiné we had Adam Yates -first yellow jersey of the Tour and winner in Bilbao- riding. Since he was not very far from Vingegaard, we could compare his numbers to take those of Pogacar and be able to compare, we do it a lot ”. The work that is not seen.
It is inevitable, says San Millán, that “one makes the other better. The high level of the rival forces you to demand yourself, to demand all of us to reconquer the crown and that makes them more competitive. They bite each other fast. This generation of cyclists is incredible.” For talent and ability. The Álava coach is still amazed by Pogacar’s performance. The cyclist capable of winning the Tour, Paris-Nice, the Tour of Flanders or Liège. All. “Even I am still surprised,” he confesses. And that I know him better than he knows himself. But what amazes me the most is how well he responds to training. As soon as he does a couple of good blocks of work he is doing very well”.
Thus, he assures, “it is a joy to work with him. The normal thing is to have a positive progression but each year it is a little less and, in his case, it continues to grow. We don’t know if he will do it more or less, but I do know that he still has a margin. To be a better cyclist yet. “How long will it continue to grow? Time will tell”, San Millán responds.
#Iñigo #San #Millán #brain #Tadej #Pogacar