Manager Pogacar: 'secret' knee injury in Tour caused by collision with Visma car

It was a close call that Tadej Pogačar did not win the recent Tour de France. An inflammation in his knee was the best-kept secret of UAE Emirates XRG. Inside the team, there was great concern. According to his manager Alex Carera, the knee problems were caused by a collision with a Visma | Lease a Bike team car.

That is remarkable because Pogačar stated last year on the Tour 202 podcast that he first started having knee pain the day after the stage finishing on Mont Ventoux (stage sixteen). "I even began to doubt whether I could continue at all, or finish the queen stage (to Col de la Loze, ed.). And then there was also the stage to La Plagne."

However, Carera now tells a different story: the influential manager revealed this week on the Domestique Hotseat podcast that the knee problems only started to manifest after a collision with a Visma | Lease a Bike team car, just before the start of the eighteenth stage to Courchevel.

Protecting 
"When he crashed into the Visma car, he was really unlucky, because it was a bizarre situation," Carera explains. "Of course, he got worried afterward because Tadej wasn’t feeling well. At one point, he wasn’t sure if he could continue the race."

Pogačar’s injury was deliberately kept under wraps by his team. "It was my job to protect him so that this information wouldn’t leak out. If it had, we would undoubtedly have seen a different race, with teams attacking earlier. Thanks to his experience, he managed to get through this difficult period. Without that experience, he might have lost the Tour."