The last male winner of cycling's triple crown, Stephen Roche, has 'welcomed Tadej Pogačar to the club' after he emulated the Irishman and Eddy Merckx and became the third man in history to win the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championships in the same season.
Pogačar ended the 37-year wait for the feat to be repeated in men's racing, with Annemiek van Vleuten netting the only women's triple crown in 2022, doing so with an outrageous 100km to-go attack and subsequent 50km solo ride in Zürich on Sunday.
Roche was present in Switzerland to congratulate Pogačar, the first-ever Slovenian world champion, sharing an embrace post-race and posing for pictures in the mixed zone while holding up three fingers to symbolise the triple.
"I feel like I'm in a sandwich now between Merckx and Pogačar which is not bad. But I think it's really great because it makes the whole thing a little more human," said Roche speaking to Dutch broadcaster NOS.
"It's 37 years since I won it, I was 13 years after Merckx, but everybody was saying it's not possible - 'A new era', 'Different generations', 'It can't be done again'.
"I believe records are there to be broken and beaten and improved upon, so for me, it's great that it's this particular person that has done the triple and I'm delighted to be here to give him the keys to the house."
In similar fashion to many of Pogačar's competitors on the day, Roche was stunned by the 26-year-old's ability to stay away once he'd made his audacious move out of the peloton and committed to a long-range move akin to that of Merckx's generation of racing, choosing to simply sum up the win as "phenomenal".
"What a ride. You can't describe the superhuman effort he's done," said the Irishman.
"If it was the first time we'd seen this, I'd have said it was suicide, but we've seen him do this before. Just out of feel in his heart and his soul, he goes. He doesn't think or question 'Should I? Do I? Who's looking?', and he's confident and he will carry it out till the end, and he did.
"Of course when I saw him going, I'm saying maybe myself and Eddy Merckx might stay another little while in the seat of triple crown winners but we knew Pogi even going far is not suicide for him because he's done it before."
Roche believes there have been other riders in recent memory capable of achieving the triple crown but in no year have the three parcours been perfect nor has the rider able to quite emulate what Merckx first did in the 1974 season. It's fitting that Pogačar, whom the sport's greatest-ever rider Merckx has suggested has surpassed him for that title, was the next man to do it.
"It's not because it's taken 37 years for Pogačar to do it, that there haven't been other guys capable of doing it like Froome, Indurain, Armstrong, these guys could have all done it," said Roche.
"But these guys are a certain kind of categorised rider, so if you get a flat World Championships, generally the guy that's won the Giro and the Tour hasn't got a fast enough sprint to beat the real sprinters so he's automatically at a handicap.
"Whereas this year, all the stars have lined up, the Giro and Tour were good for Pogačar and we had a World Championships like we have today. It's impossible to have a WC circuit like today every year because you're favouring a certain category of rider so for once, this was Pogacar's year to do it. It may not happen again for a few years but this was his year."
