Tadej Pogačar uploads Tour of Flanders win to Strava... gets flagged

Clearly the wall-to-wall TV coverage detailing every pedal stroke of Tadej Pogačar's history-making Tour of Flanders success was not enough proof,  because his Strava activity — including an obliteration of the Oude Kwaremont KOM — has been flagged.

To our delight Pogačar uploaded his activity to the ride-sharing app for us to stare longingly in disbelief at the stats, the most eye-catching of which was his second ascent of the Oude Kwaremont, the one that distanced the entire peloton and had Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert scrambling, and saw him become the first man to go sub-four minutes up the 2.15km segment.

That effort was 11 seconds faster than the previous best, set by Kasper Asgreen during last year's race and 14 seconds faster than Van Aert's ascent at the same point in the race yesterday.

The 24-year-old's decisive attack on the final ascent of the Kwaremont was also the fifth fastest time ever set, not bad for someone with a KOM and nearly 260km already in the legs.

And the Strava times back up the TV visuals, showing it was the long (for Flanders), shallower slopes of the Kwaremont where Pogačar showed his class, his 17km/h ascents of the Paterberg fast for you or me, but not even in the top 700 fastest times for the 300m-long segment where unsurprisingly the quickest times are not set by those in their sixth hour of Monument racing.

Likewise on the Koppenberg, Pogačar's 1:55 was two seconds slower than the chase of Van Aert behind and would be joint 13th on the leaderboard had it not been flagged.

> I lost my Strava KOM to someone who 'cycled' from London to Newcastle in six hours

On the stats front, the UAE Team Emirates superstar, who now has four Monument wins by the age of 24 and just needs to win Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix to complete the set, covered the extra long 270km Flanders distance in a little over six hours, at an average speed of 44.2km/h.

His max speed hit 86.6km/h and Strava estimates Pogačar burned 6,050 calories. The win came hours after the Gen Z representative had caused something of a meltdown online after replying to Twitter memes just 15 minutes before the race was due to start.

Pogačar replied to a tweet about riders who have won one-day races in which both Van Aert and Van der Poel have started, something which at 9.43 in the morning he had not yet achieved. 

"Motivation for today," the two-time Tour de France winner wrote. A little over six hours later he joined the club...

A quick update from the future... Thankfully the powers that be at Strava have deemed Pogačar's ride to be legitimate, restoring his leaderboard-shattering Kwaremont KOM and the rest of his mind-boggling segment times. Give the man some kudos...