The problem with the best thing you’ve ever seen is not that it ruins everything else. It’s that you didn’t know, while it was happening, that it was the best thing you’d ever see.
Harry Talbot and Kristof Ramon
Metaphorically speaking, I am standing atop the Poggio, 172 meters above sea level, staring down at the sparkling Mediterranean, down at the Via Roma, down at the rest of my life as a fan of bike racing. At approximately 4:48 pm local time on Saturday afternoon, Tadej Pogačar beat Tom Pidcock by half a wheel, and in doing so ruined every bike race I will ever watch for the rest of my life.
A slight exaggeration. And yet. How on earth does one go on?
If I dig deep into the Philosophy 101 class I should have attended more regularly nearly 20 years ago, Plato believed that everything we perceive in the physical world is an imperfect copy of a perfect, eternal Form that exists in some higher realm of pure abstraction. The chair you are sitting in is a degraded copy of the ideal Chair. The coffee you are drinking is a pale imitation of the Form of Coffee. You get the idea. On Saturday, we witnessed the Form of Bike Race.
Not a good bike race. Not one of the great ones. The template from which all other bike races are merely derived. The eternal, unchanging ideal against which every subsequent race will be measured and found wanting. Pogačar crashing with 32 kilometres to go. The chase back, jersey in tatters, butt hanging out (which, it turns out, may be one of his lucky omens). The Cipressa going off like a bomb. Mathieu van der Poel, bleeding from his hand after punching a Trek mid-flight, hanging on and then not hanging on. Tom Pidcock, fingers off the brake levers on the descent, arriving at the Via Roma with possibly the greatest male cyclist of all time. The sprint. Four centimeters, Pidcock said, looking like this bike race might have ruined him, too.
I am now Plato’s prisoner, back in the cave, watching shadows. The shadows are fine. Some of them are quite good. None of them are the sun.
Have you heard of the peak-end rule? It comes from psychology, I believe; a quick Google suggests the Nobel-winning Daniel Kahneman came up with it. It dictates, basically, that we don’t judge experience by average quality, but rather by two specific moments. The peak, and the end. Everything else is irrelevant to what gets lodged in our memory.
Milan-San Remo is, I realized this weekend, structurally optimized for the peak-end rule. No disrespect to Sylvan Dillier, who spent the entire distance of a normal Classic pulling the peloton across the flat plain south of Milan, but his bit is not what most of us will remember. Milan-San Remo is six hours of largely irrelevant middle, then, this year, 40 minutes of peak. And then it ends, abruptly, jubilantly, with Rob Hatch at his eloquent finest shouting adrenaline straight into my veins. No flat post-Paterberg chase like at Flanders, no ceremonial stage to Paris like at the Tour. Milan-San Remo is a machine for manufacturing perfect memories and has been doing so for 117 years.
Kahneman also identified something called hedonic adaptation, which is the phenomenon by which humans return, over time, to a baseline level of happiness regardless of what happens to them. If you win the lottery or you experience great tragedy, you will adapt; the happiness or sadness will fade and you return to who you were.
Kahneman says this will happen to me. I will, eventually, watch a bike race and not spend the first 20 minutes thinking about how it is not the Via Roma. I wonder how long that will take.
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