Tour de France verdict: Tadej Pogacar victory is a triumph to match completion of race itself during pandemic

• Tour de France 2020, stage 21 results and final standings

One of the most extraordinary, surreal Tour de France editions in the history of cycling’s greatest race ended on Sunday night with its youngest champion in over a century almost completely speechless. “I cannot describe how I’m feeling right now,” mumbled 21 year-old Tadej Pogacar from somewhere beneath his face mask. “It was a really amazing three weeks on the road.”

It really was. Pogacar could be forgiven for being tongue-tied. The Slovenian, who turns 22 on Monday, was standing on the podium in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe behind him, speaking to an audience of millions, having catapulted himself into the global sporting consciousness from nowhere in the space of 24hrs with one of the most astonishing rides ever seen in the sport.

Pogacar’s individual time trial to the summit of La Planche des Belles Filles on Saturday will go down in cycling’s annals. Riding second from last on the road, the UAE Team Emirates rider managed to turn a 57-second deficit to his compatriot and pre-race favourite, Primoz Roglic, into a 59-second advantage by the finish.

Roglic, the former ski jumper who had worn the maillot jaune for 11 days and had cycling’s newest superteam, Jumbo-Visma, protecting him day after day, was considered the strong favourite for the stage and the race. No one counted on the 21 year-old Pogacar, from Komenda, a tiny village in the Upper Carniola region of Slovenia with a population of less than one thousand. It was one of the great sporting muggings.

Pogacar has not come completely out of nowhere. He finished on the podium at last year’s Vuelta a España, winning three stages in the process. But this is the Tour de France. The best riders in the world focus exclusively on this race. Pogacar was racing in his first Tour and his team UAE Team Emirates were nowhere near a match for Jumbo-Visma. “It is incredible,” Pogacar conceded. “Standing here. It’s been an amazing three-week adventure. I have to thank everyone involved in all the preparations. All the hard work in the team, my family, everyone who supported me.”

As he was speaking, Roglic’s baby, which the older man was cradling on the podium, briefly cried out. There was no crying from Roglic on Sunday. The 30 year-old admitted he had shed tears in the wake of his implosion on La Planche des Belles Filles, when he had appeared to fight his bike to a standstill as the Tour slipped agonisingly through his fingers.

But Roglic's sportsmanship and his graciousness, which he had demonstrated when he interrupted Pogacar’s television interview post-stage on Saturday to congratulate him, and again in his press conference later that evening, were once again in evidence. He buried his own crushing disappointment. Riding into Paris arm-in-arm, both men smiling and laughing, it was clear their friendship had survived their enthralling battle.

It was that sort of Tour. Perhaps the threat of Covid-19, the awareness that there were far greater problems out there, was a reminder that we should all be thankful to be here racing at all.

Paris looked stunning as ever, bathed in the red glow of a mid-September evening, the Arc de Triomphe lit up spectacularly behind the podium. Of course, the fact that it was already getting dark as the ceremony was taking place was another reminder that this Tour was taking place two months later than usual due to Covid-19. There were others. Only 5,000 fans were allowed on the Champs Elysées, lending the final day a sparser, less hectic feel. It was also considerably cooler than normal.

That the race reached the French capital at all, though, was impressive; testament not only to protocols in place but to the bloodymindedness of organisers ASO and the French government. There were times when it felt risky. Beginning in Nice three weeks ago, a city in one of France’s ‘red zones’ with particularly high infection rates, there was the ever-present threat of the two-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, with teams to be sent home if two or more of their 30-strong staff tested positive in a seven-day period.

But it always felt as if there was a determination to see it through. Christian Prudhomme, the race director, had boasted earlier in the year that only the two World Wars had stopped Le Tour. That was beginning to look like the worst sort of hubris when Prudhomme himself tested positive on the first rest day. But in the end, over the course of almost four weeks, not one of the 176 riders who started the race tested positive, and only a handful of team members.

And so Pogacar becomes the sport’s newest poster boy. The youngest rider to win the Tour since Henri Cornet, who won in 1904 just shy of his 20th birthday. The first Slovenian to win the Tour. And the first since Eddy Merckx in 1969 to win three jerseys: the yellow jersey, the King of the Mountains jersey for best climber, and white jersey of the best young rider, in the same edition. Merckx won the yellow, green points jersey and polka-dot jersey in 1969.

In what was probably the takeaway line from his victory press conference on Saturday, Pogacar had told us that he was “just a kid from Slovenia with two sisters and one brother”, adding that he was not comfortable with all this attention. "This press conference is too big for me," he laughed. He is going to have to get used to it. The UAE Emirates rider’s image was being projected onto the Burj Khalifa on Sunday night.

There is clearly a fun young man beneath the mask. A video of Pogacar doing a Covid lockdown rap briefly went viral during the race. But until he is confident showing that side of his personality in public, it may be that he lets his legs do the talking. He has always been comfortable using them. There is a nice story about Pogacar doing the rounds from when he was very young. The former professional rider Andrej Hauptman, who is now Slovenia’s national coach, turned up at a race and saw a group of teenagers with a much smaller child 100 metres off the back. Hauptman told the organisers they ought to do something to help the child, until they pointed out it was the “little guy” who was about to lap the older kids. Pogacar is still lapping the older kids, just on a bigger stage.