Tadej Pogacar would have been difficult for me to beat says Bradley Wiggins ahead of Tour de France defence

Bradley Wiggins thinks the only way for rival teams to stop Tadej Pogacar from dominating cycling would be to lure him away from UAE Team Emirates. Pogacar, 23, has established himself as one of the best talents around, winning the last two editions of the Tour de France as well as several stage races. Ad/> He has won Tirreno–Adriatico and the UAE Tour this season, and also won Strade Bianche after an audacious solo attack with 50 kilometres remaining.

Tour de France'Can’t trump talent with money' — Wiggins fires Ineos warning26 MINUTES AGO It looks like it will be a tough challenge to prevent him winning a third straight Tour de France this summer, and Discovery Cycling expert Wiggins is uncertain how he would have tried to beat him. “It’d be very, very difficult. I think I might have struggled actually,” Wiggins, who won the Tour in 2012, said at Discovery's year of cycling launch.

“He’s a great time trialist. He would have out-climbed me. He’s got that youthful exuberance where there’s a naivety around him, where he doesn’t quite realise in some ways what he’s achieving.

Although he does — there is a contradiction in that because he’s willing to take risks. He’s willing to attack far from the finish. Former pros praise 'superstar' Girmay Bernal back on his bike after crash “By the time I won the Tour de France, I’d lost all that.

I was becoming an old gear and I had to be very calculated. I did measure my efforts and we raced in a way with Sky that rode to my powers and my strength which was time-trialling and riding threshold. And I think had we done that Pogacar would attacked over the top and made it very difficult for us.