Tour de France winner Tadej Pogacar ruled out of Olympics due…

Tour de France champion Tadej Pogacar has been excluded from the Paris 2024 Olympics, the Slovenian Olympic Committee (OKS) announced on Monday. Pogacar, who secured his third Tour de France victory on Sunday, completing a Tour and Giro d’Italia double in 2024, was omitted due to fatigue, according to an OKS statement.

“The men’s national cycling team coach has revealed the riders selected for this year’s Olympic Games in Paris. Tadej Pogacar, due to fatigue, will not be among them,” the statement read. “He will be replaced by his national team colleague Domen Novak. We congratulate Pogacar on another victory in the most prestigious cycling race in the world and hope he will represent Slovenia at the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics.”

The 25-year-old Pogacar, a winner of prestigious one-day classics such as the Tour of Flanders, Giro di Lombardia, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, was among the favorites for the Olympic road race, a challenging 225km course around Paris on August 3. The defending Olympic champion, Richard Carapaz, who also won the mountains classification at this year’s Tour de France, was not selected by Ecuador.

Pogacar, the first man since Marco Pantani in 1998 to win both the Giro and Tour in the same season, is now likely to target the world road race championship in September. He has no plans to compete in the Vuelta a España this year, despite the potential for an unprecedented Grand Tour hat-trick.

“People suggest doing the Vuelta, but I try to let it go in one ear and out the other,” Pogacar said. Instead, he aims to achieve the “triple crown” of cycling by adding the world road race title in Zürich. Pogacar finished third last year as Mathieu van der Poel claimed gold in Glasgow.

“Putting a cherry on top of this season would be to have a really nice August, relax a bit, prepare well for the world championships, and then give it my all,” Pogacar added. “Mathieu looks good in the rainbow jersey, but I want to take it from him.”

The triple crown of Giro, Tour, and world road race titles has only been achieved twice in men’s cycling by Eddy Merckx in 1974 and Ireland’s Stephen Roche in 1987.