A tiny Category 4 climb just revealed some telling information about Tadej Pogačar's level heading into this summer's Tour de France.
After spending hours riding the flats at 330w and the climbs over 400w, Tadej threw in a massive effort up a short 1-kilometer climb near the finish, climbing it at 2,428 VAM for 3 minutes and 16 seconds.
For those of you not familiar with VAM, it is an accurate way to measure and compare climbing speed on similar climbs between different riders.
Why is this VAM significant? To start, this climb is similar to the Mur de Huy in distance and gradient. When you compare Tadej's VAM today to Seixas' VAM on the Mur, Tadej climbed it at a slightly faster climbing speed.
What's wild is that he did this after attacking, riding away on a moderate climb, and soloing for massive time gains on everyone.
Tadej clearly has continued to build his repeatable explosive ability (what we call the potency factor in CINCH). But what's different is that he's improved this significantly after spending substantial time in his threshold zones. It's important that he was able to execute this effort after over 40 minutes in the Threshold Zone (we call this the Threshold Factor) and over 1 hour in the high Zone 2 (we call this the Fall to Factor).
I think Tadej is continuing to build and evolve his engine in areas others don't focus on. He's training each component to exceed the best performances his rivals can produce.
Today's final climb shows just how hungry he is to actually be the best, not just chase rankings and results.
