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I have one month to catch up on all the movies, TV shows, video games, and books released in the last year. Also, I may have come up short on my goal of engaging with all the movies, TV shows, video games, and books from the 2024-25 sports years during July of 2025 … so let me know about past years as well.

This is Pogačar’s fifth Tour de France win, tying him with four other riders from decades past: Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, and Miguel Induráin. At 27, Pogačar is the youngest to win five — in fact, Induráin was 27 when he won his first.

The Athletic wrote about how Tour organizers attempted to Pogačar-proof the course this year, with the race director boldly projecting that “we made the finish as difficult as possible so the yellow jersey won’t be secure 48 hours before the end.” Wrong: Pogačar led the race for more than two weeks, taking the yellow jersey for good on Stage 6, way back on July 9th.

While Pogačar doesn’t have the most stage wins in Tour history (… yet), The Athletic notes that Pogačar holds the record for the highest career percentage of stage wins (17.6 percent) and most stage wins on mountain top finishes (16 … nobody else has more than eight.)

In this Tour alone, Pogačar broke the record for the fastest climbs up to two of the Tour’s most famous summits: the Col du Tourmalet and the Alpe d’Huez.

The climb up the Tourmalet was put in the middle of a stage surely with the thought that Pogačar would hold off the gas, knowing there was so much race remaining. Instead, Pogačar essentially won the Tour that day, setting a record up the Tourmalet and then extending his lead by riding solo for 43 kilometers.

Pogačar took 75 seconds off the Alpe D’Huez record set in 1997 by Marco Pantani by averaging 14.5 mph (23.38 km/h) over the course of a 35-minute long climb with an 8 percent gradient. Pogačar said he “didn’t know” he’d broken the Alpe d’Huez record, noting that the journalists interviewing him seemed to think it was more impressive than he did.

Pogačar broke his own record for the fastest average speed in a Tour de France, averaging 43.9 km/h (27.3 miles per hour) over the course of the roughly 2,000-mile race.

(BTW, perhaps you’re wondering about Lance Armstrong, who you may remember winning the seven Tours; those victories were rightfully stripped after he was outed as the ringleader of a massive doping operation. Regardless, Pogačar is actually racing faster than the massively juiced-up Armstrong, who held the previous Tour speed record at 41.7 km/h. Many have accused Pogačar of doping. He has been subjected to particularly rigorous testing, including an unusual 5 a.m. test during this year’s Tour. I think he’s just a freak!)

Unlike a lot of Tour champions, Pogačar is also a dominant rider in cycling’s one-day races, which are often very stylistically different from Tour stages. He has 13 wins in cycling’s famed one-day “Monument” races, the second-most all-time. He won three of the five Monuments last year, and could win four this year (he’ll be the heavy favorite if he races the climber-friendly Il Lombardia in October.) The other 11 riders to win the Tour de France in the 21st century (including Armstrong) combined to win just four Monuments in their careers.

Pogačar has also won back-to-back one-day road race World Championships while representing Slovenia, proving that his success isn’t just the product of racing for UAE Team Emirates, the best-funded squad in the sport. Both Worlds victories involved Pogačar leaving the field behind with several hours of racing to go and holding on for the win. The Guardian called Pogačar’s decision to ditch the pack in the 2024 race “audacious (and) borderline foolhardy.” Only one other 21st century rider (Cadel Evans) won both the Tour and a road race World Championship.

The biggest hope for the cycling world: Pogačar’s boredom and willingness to share. He essentially gave away a win on Stage 2 to his 22-year-old teammate, Isaac del Toro, slowing down in the final meters and patting del Toro on the back as he crossed the finish line. The AP called it “a gesture of sportsmanship that left his novice teammate stunned.” And after winning Sunday, Pogačar praised del Toro’s future, saying, “I definitely will not be doing this for a long time.”

Just a quick rundown of what’s going on here: This is Gaelic football, one of several Gaelic sports played almost exclusively in Ireland. There’s no professional league: The pinnacle of the sport is the All-Ireland championship, in which each of Ireland’s 32 counties fields a team comprised of players from that county.

(As a college football fan, my immediate assumption was that, of course, somebody is paying players under-the-table to switch county allegiances. Apparently not a thing that regularly happens!)

I am not going to attempt to describe the rules of Gaelic football, but I will tell you that it’s the sport briefly depicted in the first episode of the 2020 hit show Normal People, based on a novel by Mayo’s own Sally Rooney.

Some counties are good at football, some are bad, some focus on hurling. Mayo had the worst combo: They care deeply about football, and are generally pretty good, but simply couldn’t break through and win the trophy. Their last title came in 1951, and in between 1989 and 2021, they appeared in 11 finals …

… and lost all 11. They’re basically the Buffal O’Bills.

Some of Mayo’s losses were particularly brutal. In 1996, they were winning with 30 seconds left when a speculative kick into the box somehow went completely undefended, bouncing off the ground and over the crossbar for a game-tying point. The game ended in a tie, so the two teams played again the next week and Mayo lost. (Oh yeah btw, no overtime; if a game is tied, they just come back the next week and play it again.) In a 2016 matchup against Dublin, a county 10 times their size, Mayo somehow scored two own goals, again triggering a replay, which again resulted in a loss by a single point.

The story goes that in 1951, the Mayo team was touring the county with the championship trophy when it passed a funeral. When Mayo didn’t stop, the local priest put a curse on the team, saying that Mayo would never win the All-Ireland while anybody on that team was alive.

The very specific details of the curse turned out to be true. The last surviving member of the 1951 team, Paddy Prendergast, died in 2021 at 95 years old. In a video from 2017, Prendergast said he didn’t remember whether there was a funeral at the church, but that “he saw people standing around the church.”

Gonna be honest: I kinda think the curse was real.

In Sunday’s final, Mayo played the least cursed team in the sport, Kerry, the reigning champions and winners of 39 All-Ireland championships. I once bought a shirt at the SuperValu in Dingle with all of their championships listed on it. Kerry and Mayo had played in four finals, and Kerry had won all four.

One of the players who helped turn it around for Mayo: 18-year-old Kobe McDonald, who may already be done playing for Mayo: He’s been recruited to play in the Australian Football League. There are currently 14 Irish players on AFL rosters. (Gaelic football and Aussie Rules football are similar, although the balls are shaped differently.) The AFL is played during the same months as the All-Ireland championship, so players often opt to play professionally in another hemisphere over living as an amateur back home.

Kobe, of course, is the Anglicized version of the Irish name Ciobhai, which means … no, I’m messing with you. He’s named after Kobe. But that’s a pretty fun example of globalization: an Irish athlete recruited to play an Australian sport while named after an American player in a different sport who was, in turn, named after Japanese beef.

The story of Mayo’s title drought apparently made its way to Joe Biden, who closed a 2023 speech in County Mayo by yelling MAYO FOR SAM. Biden congratulated the team after their win on Sunday.