Tadej Pogacar has only now put a full name to what happened to his body in Xeraco on 29 August.
The Slovenian left the 2026 Vuelta a España that afternoon with a broken collarbone, a concussion and a fracture of the C7 vertebra in his neck. He had the surgery, began the rehab, and started processing the end of his season.
Then came the follow-up scan at home. Speaking to The Athletic’s Jacob Whitehead in a piece published on 31 October and carried by Yahoo, Pogacar said two more fractures turned up roughly two weeks before the interview, meaning he had been living with them, undiagnosed, for close to seven weeks.
“Two weeks ago, I was in Slovenia and I went to do another CT scan. I knew I had a C7 fracture, but then we saw I had two more broken vertebrae, the T1 and T2,” he told The Athletic.
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His reaction, he said, was less anger than relief.
“I’m just happy to be alive, actually, or just to be standing.”
The crash and the lost lead
Pogacar went down 31 kilometres from the finish of Stage 8 to Xeraco after brushing shoulders in the bunch and losing the front wheel, according to NBC Sports. He landed on his shoulder and face, tried to remount and could not. He walked to the ambulance.
He had led the race by 3 minutes 50 seconds over Enric Mas at the time. It was the first stage race of his career he had failed to finish, and the crash also ruled him out of the UCI Road World Championships.
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Stage 8 was won by Bryan Coquard, his first Grand Tour stage victory.
‘I was really down’
The weeks between the hospital in Spain and the follow-up scan in Slovenia were the hardest part, Pogacar told The Athletic. He described a stretch of low mood that he said only lifted when his body let him start training again.
“For the first two weeks, I was really mentally not OK. I was really down. I was not a fun person to be around.”
He said the turning point was getting back on an indoor trainer and going to physiotherapy daily, which pulled his head out of the slump as much as his body.
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Pogacar also told the outlet he no longer has day-to-day pain, but has been warned off anything that could reload the healing vertebrae: heavy lifting with the left arm, awkward loads on the neck, and above all another crash.
What the gap in the diagnosis means
The seven-week gap between the first medical read and the discovery of the T1 and T2 fractures is the awkward part of the story. The initial scans in Spain, as reported after the crash, listed one vertebral fracture; the Slovenian imaging listed three.
That is the detail that has pushed the conversation beyond Pogacar’s own season and back onto a familiar question in professional cycling, where fallen riders are routinely cleared, strapped up and returned to competition inside days. Pogacar, in this case, was not sent back out, he abandoned on the day. But he spent weeks of early rehabilitation unaware that two of his thoracic vertebrae were broken.
Neither Pogacar nor his team has publicly reopened the question of how the two fractures were missed, and no formal review has been announced.
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He is expected back for the 2026-27 off-season programme with UAE Team Emirates XRG, with his race calendar for next year yet to be confirmed.
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