Tadej Pogacar spent three weeks racing Mathieu van der Poel across France in July. Then his subconscious took over.
In a behind-the-scenes video from UAE Team Emirates-XRG, the Slovenian told teammates over breakfast that Van der Poel had turned up in a nightmare so vivid it showed up on his Whoop sleep tracker.
His message to the Dutchman was blunt.
“Mathieu, if you’re hearing this: you’re causing stress in my dreams.”
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A downhill along the guardrails
Pogacar described a descent straight out of a horror film.
“I dreamed I was riding at the front with Van der Poel and that we went into a descent like crazy. A crazy downhill.”
“I dreamed that we were riding our bikes along the guardrails, the barriers that stop cars from going off the road. Then I suddenly hit the guardrail. It was crazy.”
The Slovenian wears a Whoop tracker for sleep and stress data. When he woke up, the readout matched the dream.
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“Then I checked my Whoop stress and it was extremely high. It must have been because of that downhill dream.”
“My stress is always very low at the beginning and in the middle of the night, but when I start dreaming in the morning, my stress goes through the roof.”
Van der Poel got the real ending
On Sunday, 26 July, Van der Poel went clear with Pogacar on the final Montmartre climb of stage 21 and beat the yellow jersey to the line on the Champs-Élysées, with Jasper Philipsen second and Mads Pedersen third.
“A year I was thinking about this,” Van der Poel said.
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“When I was sick last year and I had to watch the stage on television, I was already thinking about this moment.”
Pogacar took the yellow jersey by 6 minutes 26 seconds over Remco Evenepoel, tying the all-time record of five Tour de France victories held by Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain. At 27, he is the youngest rider ever to reach that mark.
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