Fabio Aru bluntly on Tadej Pogacar

“I don’t want to repeat the word ‘cannibal,’ but that’s the sense….”

After his assertion of authority, his second in a row in this Tour de France, in the stage that featured the uphill finish at La Planche de Belles Filles, Tadej Pogacar literally drove the crowd thronging the roadsides crazy. The overwhelming power of the Slovenian rider, already a yellow jersey, surprises no one anymore. Certainly not someone like Fabio Aru, who knows him very well, having even been his teammate at the 2019 Vuelta and 2020 Tour.

“Tadej is very quiet, he is as you see him,” he said in an interview reported by ‘La Gazzetta dello Sport’ in which he also recounts the experience of having had him as a roommate. “I remember his girlfriend came to visit him. We spoke in English. I was also on his team at the 2019 Vuelta and the 2020 Tour, the first one he won. But I had a lot of problems, I had retired.”

“He has a huge talent, he was born for the bike. The pressure doesn’t touch him and even that doesn’t surprise me, because he’s going strong. He has a very competitive nature. He loves to win whenever he can. The word Cannibal has already been used for Eddy Merckx and I don’t want to repeat it, however, that is the meaning,” the Italian concluded.