Cycling came into Tadej Pogačar’s life through a family friend and fellow Komenda citizen. While studying at Ljubljana’s Faculty of Sport in 2002, Miha Koncilija coached volleyball weekly in the new sports hall in Komenda, adjoining the secondary school. For around 10 years, he played midweek games in a group that included Tadej’s mother, Marjeta. He can remember the little Tadej watching from the sidelines.
Koncilija had started racing in 1993 at Kolesarsko Društvo Rog (KD Rog), one of the oldest cycling clubs in Slovenia, stemming from the Rog bicycle company, a renowned brand in Yugoslavia. A Slovenian national junior road race champion, he shelved racing at the age of 20, wanting to commit himself to study and envisaging himself as a teacher in the gym.
He rejoined KD Rog as a coach, initially reluctantly. According to Koncilija, 80 percent of a trained sport coach’s salary is paid by the government, making it viable and affordable for communities to hire them. KD Rog had age categories going all the way up from under-12 to a modest professional team, sponsored by the mineral water brand Radenska, with a pink-and-blue jersey. For most of his career, Koncilija oversaw the club’s under-17 youth category.
Koncilija didn’t see winning as young Tadej’s burning goal. ‘Maybe he was [competitive], but he didn’t show it. I think it was much more important for him to have a good time with his group of boys. But of course, he wanted to beat them, like every normal person.’
Intake at the club was low, and his goal was to get more kids on bikes, giving them a larger talent pool. Before his arrival, the search was casual, a school here and there every year. Koncilija made the pursuit more focused, going to 20 to 30 schools annually, rising to around 40 later, surveying around 1,000 students. Every country could use someone driven, dynamic and passionate like Miha Koncilija.
He would come to the school gyms—virtually every school in Slovenia has one—with a flashy Scott CR1 carbon road bike and a Tacx home trainer. “You need to impress them,” he explains. Each test lasted two minutes, with a cycling computer sensor on the back wheel measuring distance.
Sometimes, Koncilija had only an hour to test the ability of 30 participants. If he could see someone who didn’t have the talent, he would stop them before the two minutes were up. He was looking for determination as much as quality. Sometimes, he would call on those who were third or fourth in terms of distance, seeing if they would be interested in going to a club training session. “It was much more [a case of] someone who was smaller and fighting on the bike than someone who can get more meters in two minutes,” he says.
One day in 2007, he set up his rig in the sports hall adjoining Komenda Moste school. Tilen Pogačar stepped up, performed strongly and Koncilija subsequently got on the phone to Marjeta. “I called her: ‘Look, we need some new members in cycling, maybe Tilen could try.’ And that’s how it started.”
Koncilija was persistent and proactive, sometimes calling the parents of promising children several times to convince them to give it a go. Slovenian talents Žiga Jerman, Žiga Ručigaj and Luka Pibernik were also discovered by his tests. “This was the only way we could get the kids. I don’t know whether Tadej and Tilen would have taken up this sport without this system in play,” Koncilija says.
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