HOW TO CAPTURE THE UNCATCHABLE?

How do you tell the story of a rider still winning practically every race he starts? Adam Becket speaks to Tadej Pogačar's biographer Andy McGrath to find out

- Andy McGrath

Few riders in history have made dominance look as effortless as Tadej Pogačar. The four-time Tour de France winner, back-to-back world champion and 10-time Monument victor is arguably the best rider in the history of the sport. The 27-year-old's record speaks for itself: 108 wins, 45 of them in the last two seasons. Despite all this success, there has not been a full-length biography of the Slovenian published in English - until now, with the launch of Tadej Pogačar: Unstoppable by Andy McGrath.

Having already published books on late greats Frank Vandenbroucke and Tom Simpson, journalist and writer McGrath faced a new challenge with his latest project: the subject was still alive. “Me and my friends joked after the Vandenbroucke book that my next subject had to be alive,” says McGrath. “But this is quite different. I was writing about the sport's big superstar, a moving target.” There could be no benefit of hindsight with Pogačar - his greatness still unfolding and hard to encapsulate. “Tadej needs to have a calmer, more conservative streak to be a Grand Tour racer,” the biographer reflects, “but he is also a one-day dominator, which makes him really interesting.”

Mindful that he was in pursuit of a “moving target”, McGrath had to proceed with haste. “It was one calendar year, almost to the day, from first meeting with an editor at Bloomsbury to finishing the project,” he says. “It was probably the ultimate challenge for me as a writer because I didn't want to just collage it. I wanted new insights, new stories, and to talk to people, to do it face-to-face.” Over that year McGrath was writing, his subject won a fourth Il Lombardia; a third Strade Bianche; a second Tour of Flanders and La Flèche Wallonne; a third Liège-Bastogne-Liège; the Critérium du Dauphiné; a fourth Tour de France; a second World Championships; and the European Championships; and, after the book was published, a fifth Il Lombardia. Enough to take up the whole book.