Ten days after winning a record-equalling fifth Tour de France, Tadej Pogacar is already lining up his next target. The BBC World Service's More than the Score dedicated its 22-minute episode on 5 August 2026 to a single question: "Is Tadej Pogacar unstoppable?"

The Slovenian, still only 27, claimed his fifth yellow jersey on 26 July — his third consecutive Tour victory — by a margin of almost six and a half minutes. That is not a gap. That is a different race. He now equals the all-time Tour win record, and the cycling world is running out of superlatives.

Hosted by Mani Djazmi, the episode brings in two voices from opposite sides of the sport. Jonathan Vaughters is general manager of EF Education-Easypost, a team that competes directly against Pogacar's UAE Team Emirates squad. Matt Warwick is a BBC journalist who examines what this level of dominance does to cycling as a spectacle — whether one rider winning everything is thrilling for fans or suffocating for the sport.

Vaughters' perspective is the most striking. He believes Pogacar may be his own biggest competition — that the challenge is not finding a rider who can beat him, but finding one who can even stay close. Coming from a man whose own team lines up against UAE Team Emirates every season, that carries weight. Vaughters also argues that cycling's drug-testing regime is far more rigorous than other sports, pushing back against the whispers that inevitably follow any rider who wins this much, this fast.

Those whispers are not new to cycling. The sport lived through the Lance Armstrong era and the scandal that followed. Vaughters' point is that the testing landscape has shifted — that the biological passport, out-of-competition controls and year-round tracking make sustained cheating far harder than it was a decade ago. He does not dismiss the history. He contextualises it.

The episode also digs into Pogacar's next move. He is confirmed for the 2026 Vuelta a España, which starts on 22 August. It will be his first appearance at the race since 2019 — seven years ago, when he was a 20-year-old breaking through. The Vuelta is the only one of cycling's three Grand Tours (the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta) he has yet to win. Winning all three across a single season is the so-called triple crown, and it is the gap left on an otherwise staggering résumé.

For context on just how much ground Pogacar covered this summer alone, the Tour de France spanned three weeks and roughly 3,400 kilometres of racing. He won it by a margin that, in modern cycling, is almost unheard of. Stage races are usually decided by minutes, not fractions of minutes, and six and a half is a chasm.

Whether he can carry that form into Spain's mountains and searing late-August heat, against rivals who have spent the summer training specifically to peak for the Vuelta rather than the Tour, is the question the podcast circles but cannot answer. Nobody can — not yet. The road will.

What makes this moment unusual is not just the winning. Plenty of champions have dominated cycling. It is the spread: Pogacar wins on flat sprints, mountain stages, time trials and cobbled classics. He has won the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia, and most of the one-day Monuments — the five biggest single-day races on the calendar. The Vuelta is the last piece.

The BBC episode does not settle whether Pogacar is unstoppable. But it frames the question better than most. When a rival team manager says your biggest opponent is yourself, the field has a problem — and it starts in 17 days.