Before the five Tour de France titles and before the rainbow jerseys, there was a Scrabble board.

That is the version Marjeta Pogacar offers in Anatomy of a G.O.A.T., the 45-minute film that premiered on Saturday 7 November on Eurosport, TNT Sports and HBO Max. Asked in the film what forged her son’s drive, she does not point to a mountain or a wind tunnel. She points at the living room.

“I think we were all very competitive, even playing Scrabble or board games, or playing ball games, it was always a competition,” she says in the documentary.

Mirko Pogacar, Tadej’s father, frames it a different way in the same film, telling the filmmakers that anything done with heart and pleasure is done better.

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What rivals see when they look up

For contrast, the film turns to the men Pogacar is now measured against.

Eddy Merckx, for decades the consensus greatest of all time, offers the line that has travelled fastest from the documentary, as reported by CyclingUpToDate: “At this moment, he’s ahead of me.”

Alberto Contador goes further in the same film, calling the Slovenian the greatest cyclist of all time and arguing that no athlete in any sport has been so consistently superior to his rivals across an entire calendar.

Geraint Thomas, who has shared Grand Tour podiums with him, describes the sensation of riding beside him as a different sport altogether, telling the filmmakers Pogacar has “definitely got an extra gear or two compared to me.”

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The workload behind the kitchen-table instinct

What the family calls competitiveness, the data calls volume. Figures revealed in the documentary and reported by Domestique Cycling show that Pogacar logged 578 hours of training across 200 sessions in the six months leading into the 2026 Tour de France, which he won. His resting heart rate sits at 38 beats per minute, and his maximum reached 198 on stage 10 of this year’s race. Sleep consistency, tracked via a Whoop band, came in higher than that of any UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate.

The film arrives while he is still healing

The timing is not an accident. Pogacar is watching the premiere from his sofa rather than from altitude after a stage-8 crash at the 2026 Vuelta a España in August that initially looked like a single fractured vertebra and was later revealed to be three, according to Canadian Cycling Magazine. The injury ended his Vuelta, kept him out of the World Championships in Montreal and the European Championships in Slovenia, and doctors say the vertebrae could take up to a year to fully heal.

Marjeta’s worry is less about the bones than about the habit.

“I hope he hasn’t developed some fear of riding because of this injury, as that could be a handicap going forward,” she told Slovenia’s Siol.net, in comments relayed by Canadian Cycling Magazine.

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Pogacar returned to the bike in mid-October. His 2027 programme is expected to be laid out at UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s December training camp.

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