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Primoz Roglic and Tadej Pogacar an odd couple leading Slovenia's charge to glory

<span>Photograph: Stuart Franklin)/AP</span>
Photograph: Stuart Franklin)/AP

French headline writers love to adapt the sentence used on level crossings by the national rail company to warn that if the red lights keep flashing, another train may be coming. The 2020 Tour de France is a landmark edition in various ways, but with Tadej Pogacar snatching a last-gasp, unlikely win from Primoz Roglic on Saturday, the old level-crossing cliche, un train peut en cacher un autre, could sum up the past three weeks: one Slovenian can come in the slipstream of another.

Nailing first and second in the biggest bike race in the world is a huge step for one of the smallest cycle racing nations, one with a population of two million people, which has been independent for less than 30 years. It may seem outlandish, but some unlikely places have sat at the top of the tree since the sport opened up in the mid‑1980s.

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One comparison that could be made is with Ireland, which boasted the top two in the world in Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly in 1987. It is not as much of a statistical aberration as it seems: there are five Slovenians in the Tour – the sprinter Luka Mezgec has managed two second places on stages and the former world under-23 champion Matej Mohoric has ridden strongly – which is more than the UK, Ireland, Australia or the US have fielded this year.

Slovenia boasts two international races, the Tour of Slovenia, founded in 1993, and the Kranj Grand Prix. A single Slovenian, Franc Abulnar, rode the Tour de France in 1936, but after the country split from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, a stream of his countrymen rode as professionals and in 2001 the capital, Ljubljana, hosted a stage finish in the Giro d’Italia. It has two development teams, Ljubljana, where Pogacar started out, and Roglic’s former team Adria Mobil.

The Pog and Rog double act involves two very different characters. Roglic, born in the former mining town of Kisovec, has put in eight years of constant effort after coming to racing almost impossibly late. He is not Slovenia’s first cycling star: Andrej Hauptman won a world championship bronze medal in 2001, while Janez Brajkovic was a teammate of Lance Armstrong’s Discovery and RadioShack teams, with whom he won the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2010.

It is a standing joke that commentators constantly describe Roglic as a former ski jumper, but it is not that remarkable given how important winter sports are in his country; it is also crucial for his cycling career. He began jumping at 13 and the turning point was a horrendous accident at the age of 17, which set his winter sports career back, prompting him to look elsewhere.

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What is truly remarkable is how old he was when he began bike racing, in 2012, aged 22. By that age, most top cyclists have been in the game for eight to 10 seasons. There is little crossover between the sports, although Roglic has pointed to the way skiing develops core strength. He started racing with an immense disadvantage in terms of tactics and bike handling, which are best learned during a cyclist’s teenage years.

In that context, progressing to become Slovenia’s first Grand Tour stage winner in 2016 – a time trial in the Giro d’Italia – was a major achievement and since then Roglic has added one first for his country after another: first stage in the Tour de France (2017) and the country’s first Grand Tour win last year at the Vuelta. It looked as if he would be the one to win Slovenia’s first Tour de France, but it fell away at the last.

Pogacar, on the other hand, is an unfeasibly precocious talent who has been steeped in cycling for all his formative years. Coached by Hauptman, who is now Slovenia’s national coach, he was the youngest winner of a WorldTour stage race when he triumphed at the Tour of California in 2019 and one of the youngest Grand Tour podium finishers last year when he came third to Roglic at the Vuelta. When he took this year’s Tour stage at Laruns, he became the youngest stage winner since Armstrong in 1993. He is now set to be the youngest Tour winner since 1904.

To illustrate his protege’s early promise, Hauptman told Procycling magazine how he turned up to a kids’ race in 2011 and saw a group of teenage riders leading, with a much younger youth trying to catch up 100m behind. He said to the organisers something should be done to help the young kid; they pointed out the “little guy” was about to lap a group of riders who were all older and theoretically stronger.

Along with last year’s Tour winner, Egan Bernal, the Belgian prodigy Remco Evenepoel, Holland’s Mathieu van der Poel and – perhaps – Yorkshire’s Tom Pidcock, Pogacar is one of a golden young generation who are set to dominate in the coming years. If Roglic suddenly turned into a man of the past in the space of an hour, his young compatriot should be a key part of the Tour’s future.