To the winner, the spoils. In fact, to the dominant rider and team in the 2024 Tour de France, Tadej Pogacar and UAE Team Emirates, goes more than one-third of the entire prize pot of €2,282,200 (£1.9m) on offer to all 22 teams competing in this year’s Tour.
For a team whose total budget is in the region of €50m (£42m), and for a rider, Pogacar, earning in the region of six or seven million euros a year, plus endorsements, €806,810 – UAE’s share of the Tour’s total prize fund – amounts to loose change.
From Florence to Nice, via much of France, the 25-year-old Slovenian crushed his rivals to the extent that he sometimes appeared to be toying with them. He won the Giro d’Italia in May by almost 10 minutes and, if he had perhaps allowed himself to have been more aggressive earlier in the Tour, he would have inflicted a similarly heavy defeat by the time he reached Nice on Sunday.
Pogacar, one of cycling’s “big four” stage race riders – Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglic are the other three – is hoovering up the cash in 2024. After becoming the first rider in the 21st century to achieve the Giro-Tour double, Pogacar now stands alone.
But dominant though he was as an individual, tradition dictates that he will split his own prize money of half a million euros with his team and backroom staff. For the Slovenian, though, the real money is now to be made in legacy, not just endorsements, sponsorships and one-off appearances.
He has become a phenomenon, something which his team’s sports director, Matxin Fernández, acknowledges. “With his character and his attitude, as a cyclist he’s perfection,” Fernández said of Pogacar. But he added: “It’s a complete team, a team of super champions working for an exceptional rider.”
There is no doubt that, in winning both the Giro and the Tour in less than two months, Pogacar has been supported by perhaps the strongest stage racing team ever assembled. People might argue that past serial winners such as Eddy Merckx, Lance Armstrong and even Chris Froome enjoyed similarly well-drilled support, but there has rarely been more firepower behind the champion in back-to-back Grand Tour wins.
From Britain’s Adam Yates to Portugal’s João Almeida, many of his lieutenants would be team leaders elsewhere, and the quality of his support riders has overwhelmed his opponents. “We did a perfect job,” Almeida said in Nice. “We can be proud of what we have done.”
Next in Pogacar’s sights – after he dropped out of the Olympics on Monday due to fatigue – may be the world road race title in September. Victory in Zürich would complete cycling’s “triple crown” in one year, an achievement only previously managed by Merckx in 1974 and Stephen Roche in 1987.
Pogacar’s self-belief is such that none of the cynicism towards his performances, will bother him. “There will always be doubts, because of cycling before my time,” he said late on Sunday evening.
“There will always be someone who talks bad about someone. In cycling, Wada and the UCI have invested a lot of money and time to make this sport clean. I think this is one of the cleanest sports in the whole world because of what happened, so many years ago.
“In any sport, in any situation of life, if somebody’s winning, there’s always jealousy, there’s always haters. If you don’t have haters, you’re not succeeding.”
