'He was in a lot of pain and we doubted he’d make it to the finish' – the knee injury that almost derailed Tadej Pogačar's Tour de France triumph

Tadej Pogačar's knee injury at the Tour de France was so bad that a hospital visit was required, his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammate Tim Wellens has revealed.

In an interview with French sports newspaper L'Équipe, published on Tuesday, the Belgian said that the squad were worried he would be unable to complete the race, such was the pain.

The injury was already public knowledge, but the hospital trip shows how close the yellow jersey came to leaving the race. It also partly explains why the Slovenian throttled back his dominant performance as the race went on. Pogačar still won his fourth Tour by over four minutes, and took four stage wins, but there was a sense he was not at his best in the Alps.

"The day after the stage with the finish on Mont Ventoux, I had problems with my knee and I started to have doubts about whether I would be able to continue at all, whether I would be able to endure the queen stage," Pogačar told Slovenian outlet siol.net last month.

"In the stage to Valence [stage 17] he said to me: 'Tim, we have a problem, my knee hurts.' It was so bad he walked to the doctor’s car to be examined. After the stage, he went to the hospital," Wellens explained, giving more context.

"They found an inflammation or something like that, and nobody knew," he continued. "He was in a lot of pain and we doubted he’d make it to the finish. We even considered stopping. On the team bus, we could see he wasn’t doing well."

Wellens added: "It was a relief that he didn’t give up in the mountains. Everyone wondered why he wasn’t attacking, which is understandable… Afterwards we worried about him physically, but mentally I was surprised to read he wanted to go home, because we actually had a great time together."

Pogačar had intimated he was tired during press conferences towards the end of the race, and at the end of the Tour, he said: "I'm at this point in my career that if I do burnout I would be happy with what I achieved. To be serious, burnouts happen in sport, in a lot of sport, mental and physical burnout. We do train a lot, I think cyclists are a bit too obsessed with training, and we always try our hardest. Everyone wants to train more and more.

"You see some riders have fatigue too early in the season, and the team needs you to race, race, race, and you keep going in this circle and you never recover. Then you get to October and finally a break, then in December you do it all again. Burnouts happen all the time, and it could happen to me as well."

Last month, his mother told French website Le Parisien that she would understand it if he took a break from cycling.