With about fifteen minutes left, Milan-San Remo becomes the best bike race of the year. Every year. No exceptions.
For approximately six hours on Saturday, the answer to the question posed by IsMilanSanRemoExcitingYet.com is no. A break goes out, the peloton allows it. The break gets absorbed early, or late, but either way, nobody is particularly surprised. On the flat roads south of Milan, several hundred of the world’s best cyclists ride at a pace that suggests their target is a coffee shop, not a finish line.
And then, with about 15 minutes left, sometimes closer to 30 if we’re lucky, it becomes the best bike race of the year. Every year. No exceptions.
I have a lot of feelings about Milan-San Remo. This is one of them.
Let’s indulge in a brief bit of daydreaming: Tadej Pogačar has been thinking about the Cipressa, trying to figure it out. On Saturday, it’s where he goes. Not on the Poggio, on the Cipressa, the one before it, the one everyone always gets wrong. Riders think it’s too important or they think it’s not important enough; then the road narrows and the switchbacks come early and the gradient does something specific and unpleasant to a group that has already ridden 270 km. They use too much energy or too little, too far forward or too far back, and either is equally fatal.
The Cipressa starts in a clump, the whole peloton is here, all trying to fit in the same space. If you’re more than 20 wheels back your race is over, because on the front is an entire UAE Team Emirates, ready to ruin everyone’s day.
Your first coach told you to attack when it hurts most because everyone else is hurting too, and Pogačar is very good at this. The only thing is, he isn’t hurting yet. So he goes, and the elastic snaps. He goes the way Pogačar often goes, which is not dramatically, not with a great heave and a roar, but with a small and decisive acceleration when everyone else is already on their limit.
He hears nothing because the wind and motos make it impossible to hear much of anything, but he knows what’s behind him. He knows the way you know things after years of doing this: Mathieu Van der Poel is there. The Dutchman who treats Pogačar’s accelerations like they insulted his mother, who was told by his own teammates to slow down at Tirreno, who filed this information away somewhere and then ignored it.
Pogačar goes again. Not with much. He doesn’t have much, because nobody has much at this point in this race, and also because the wind is coming from somewhere complicated and the draft is a strange, shifting thing on a road full of switchbacks.
So there are two of them. This is fine. This is the plan, more or less. Twenty-two kilometers to go.
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