Tadej Pogačar was very impressionable as a young child. Whenever he was introduced to a new sport or activity, he was curious about it and wanted to know more. Like the first time he saw someone on a unicycle. “There was a guy in the neighbourhood who had a unicycle, and one time he came to an event with it,” his mother Marjeta tells me in a spacious cafe in their home town of Komenda, 20km from the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana.

“He showed people how to ride it and our kids were really interested. They wanted to learn, so we bought them one.” Sibling competition soon called for the purchase of a second unicycle, and in no time the 10-year-old Tadej and his older brother, Tilen, were regularly riding around the small town of 6,000 people on one wheel. “If you gave them a unicycle now, they could still ride it. They were always practising,” Marjeta adds.

Unicycles aren’t often thought of as cargo bikes, but the brothers would even ride them to their paternal grandparents’ farm to collect milk. “When we’d tell Tadej and Tilen to go fetch some milk, they’d say: ‘It’s too hard to walk. It’s easier to go by bike,’ so they’d go by unicycle,” Marjeta laughs.

This article was published in Cycling Weekly in December 2024. You can read the full article here.