"Tadej Pogačar Is Afraid Of Two Riders: Vingegaard And Van Aert" — Zonneveld Argues Visma's Structurally Anti-Pogačar Race Model Is The One Approach UAE Cannot Comfortably Counter, And The 2026 Spring Has Already Proven It
Saturday morning Eindhoven. Eight days after Wout van Aert beat Tadej Pogačar in a two-up sprint to the line at Paris-Roubaix — Visma | Lease a Bike's biggest single-day result of the post-Vingegaard-injury era — Dutch journalist Thijs Zonneveld has framed the longer story behind the result. Visma, he argues, are the only team in the men's WorldTour who have made a structural decision to race anti-Pogačar — not anti-UAE, not anti-an-individual-stage, but a coherent multi-year tactical model built around the assumption that Pogačar cannot be matched on raw power and therefore must be raced around. And it is working precisely because, in Zonneveld's reading, Pogačar is uniquely wary of the two riders the model is built around: Jonas Vingegaard and Van Aert.
The argument carries forward from a column Zonneveld published earlier this week and a follow-up television panel appearance on Wieler Revue. The reasoning, in Zonneveld's framing, is simple. Visma looked at the watt numbers in 2024 and 2025, saw that Pogačar was structurally better on every climb above 6%, and decided that trying to match him on his own terms was a strategic dead end. Their pivot — to race a controlled, selectively aggressive style that uses Vingegaard's defensive durability and Van Aert's flat-power threat as twin pressure points — has been the only model in the modern peloton that has consistently extracted points and victories from Pogačar's UAE.
The 2026 spring has been the cleanest evidence of the model working. Van Aert beat Pogačar at Paris-Roubaix in a two-up sprint after a 38km move neither rider could shake. Vingegaard, freshly returned from the long injury arc that took him out of the 2025 Tour, has signed off on a Giro d'Italia debut starting 9 May in Bulgaria — the first head-to-head three-week test against Pogačar's UAE since 2024, and one Pogačar himself has explicitly chosen not to contest. Visma's two protected cards now sit on opposite sides of the calendar in a way that forces UAE to split their preparation, their race coverage, and their tactical rotation. Zonneveld's argument is that this calendar architecture is itself the anti-Pogačar play.
The "afraid of two riders" framing is the column's most-shared line and the most-likely to be picked apart in the coming days. Pogačar himself has, when asked, generally declined to single out individual rivals — the standard line is that the race is the rival, not the rider. But the candid response Pogačar gave to an Italian podcast earlier this spring — that, in his view, Visma's tactics at the Tour de France 2024 had unfairly burdened Vingegaard, and that "if I were Vingegaard, I wouldn't be happy with that" — was read across the Dutch press as confirmation that the world champion does view Visma as a separate category of opponent. Van Aert's public reply — "He's complaining about something that's not there" — was the Visma side of the same exchange.
The internal-team angle, sourced through a recent Wieler Flits feature, is the layer Zonneveld returns to. The rivalry between UAE and Visma is, by all team-internal accounts, structurally different from any other rivalry in the modern peloton. Both teams describe the other as the only opposition that genuinely changes how their internal race plans are written. Both teams have, at various points across 2024 and 2025, made personnel decisions — signings, calendar changes, even bike-fit adjustments — with the explicit framing of "the next time we line up against them". The phrase "they hate each other" used in one Belgian outlet is overstated for a sport where teams race together two hundred days a year, but the underlying dynamic of structural opposition is real.
The counter-argument — raised in the same Dutch press — is that the model only works as long as Visma have both Vingegaard and Van Aert on the road and on form. The 2025 season, in which Vingegaard missed the Tour and Van Aert spent the spring building back from a separate injury, was the longest stretch of the post-2022 era in which the model did not function as designed. Pogačar swept the 2025 Tour and the 2025 Worlds. The 2026 spring has been Visma's first clear demonstration that, with both leaders healthy, the model can still extract elite results from the world champion. The question Zonneveld leaves open is whether the Giro — Vingegaard's three-week test, against a UAE squad that will not feature Pogačar — is a stand-alone proving ground or a preview of how the July Tour will be raced.
The wider tactical read — one that has been picked up by analysts including Karsten Knetemann on the post-Tour Ventoux stage debrief — is that Visma's anti-Pogačar model is now starting to be copied at a smaller scale by other teams. Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe's Romandie tactics this week have leaned on the same controlled-aggression framework, with Florian Lipowitz protected behind a chase template designed to crack Pogačar's chase rotation rather than match him on raw power. The model has not delivered yet for the German team — but the architecture is recognisably Visma's.
Whether Zonneveld is right that Pogačar is afraid of two specific riders, or whether the framing is simply the cleanest column-shaped version of a more diffuse tactical reality, is the kind of question a season can answer. Vingegaard rolls out at the Giro on 9 May. The Tour de France build-up tightens through June. Van Aert's calendar pivots through Quatre Jours de Dunkerque to the Belgian Nationals. The next major head-to-head on the road comes in August at the Clásica San Sebastián. By then, the question will probably have answered itself.