The Exquisite Beauty of Milano-Sanremo

The first-ever start-to-finish television coverage of Milano-Sanremo, the longest race of the season at 300 kilometers, presented the Monument in a different manner than ever seen before. We, the audience – even the ones like me who began to watch at 6:30 am instead of 4:30 when the emission began – were able to share in the sheer endurance of the event, the incredible distance covered as such very high speeds, and to revel in the shining beauty of Italy passing by on that glorious Spring day. ‘La Primavera’ has captured imaginations ever since its inauguration in 1907; the magical race flies across the flats of the Po Valley towards the sun and glamour of the Riviera where it follows the ancient via Aurelia, founded in 641 BC, along the Mediterranean Sea to the finish in the City of Flowers, Sanremo. It doesn’t get much more Italian than that. 

It was delighting to see two of the Novo Nordisk team, directed by old friend and Housatonic Valley Classic winner Vassili Davidenko, in the eight-man breakaway du jour  which gained as much as 7’30” on the peloton. The “Changing Diabetes” team – all of the racers, many of the staff and the team owner Phil Southerland live with type-1 diabetes – is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin and their presence at the front of one of the world’s great races represented a powerful display of the unstoppable capabilities held within the human spirit. Resplendent on their Colnago’s and wearing that clean and easily identifiable retro-design team kit, Andrea Peron and Charles Planet, along with the rest of their breakaway companions, rode their hearts out in the high-speed race making it well onto the Riviera before the race exploded into action behind them, with the Dutchman – blessed with  the best cycling name ever on top of a unique and beautiful riding style – Taco Van der Hoorn, last man standing of the break, making it to within 25 kilometers of the finish before being overrun by the peloton. It was a remarkable effort by the men of the breakaway in a race of such high speeds to have lasted as long as they did.                                                                                                                                                                        

I love to watch, gauge and internalize efforts that the riders make, counting their kilometers in front, length of their pulls, the respective levels of suffering. It’s just as exciting and interesting to me as a sprint finish. The three men, thus teams, who took control of the chasing peloton, keeping it in a single line almost the entire time, Paul Martin of Jumbo-Visma, “The Tractor” Tim Declercq of Deceuninck-Quickstep and Senne Leysen of Alpecin-Fenix worked for almost six-hours on the front in a trio of truly heroic efforts. But before I go into that, time for a mea culpa.

Last year, before I become overwhelmed by the onslaught of racing in that condensed season and stopped writing – “What do you mean the Giro’s just starting…!” -  I’d pontificated on how Mathieu van der Poel was ruining his career by staying with that small Alpecin-Fenix team, how they were never going to be invited to the Grand Tours (he’d just been snubbed by the Vuelta it’s fair to say), how that without those GT’s in his legs he was doomed to keep falling behind arch-rival Wout Van Aert, etc., etc. As it turns out, his team won something called the UCI Europe Tour which gave them automatic berths in all the Grand Tours. Who in the hell follows something like that? Certainly not the UCI since the Continental Tours (Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Oceanic) haven’t been updated since 2018 on their website. To have kept abreast would have been akin to avidly following the election of the local Borough Comptroller. At this point I think they may have invented the entire scenario. Never-the-less, we’ll see VdP in the Tour de France,  a great boon for the sport. Secondly, he doesn’t really seem to need the Grand Tours to be as strong as he is, certainly given the fact that he’s never in fact ridden one. One could say that VdP’s incredible career has been built with training and racing held largely within a 100-kilometer radius of his home. The Dutchman should serve as a case study in how to restructure cycling, especially from the USA point of view, perhaps condemning all of our young talent to life in Europe, to grow and develop so far from home, is not the only answer after all.          

Back at the peloton Martin was beautifully supple and smooth, the epitome of efficiency, Leysen more muscular in his style in the way of  van der Poel and like his team leader, unafraid of taking on the ‘bigs’ of the peloton, while the Tractor, well, I just love the Tractor. If you are a Sam Bennet or Julian Alaphilippe, just imagine the sense of responsibility you feel in watching Big Tim bury himself for you, hour after hour after hour.  While Martins and Leysen eventually faded on the Aurilia, Tim Declercq kept on the front, all the way to the second of the three Capi – or hills – that open up the true hostilities of the race, before the deciding Cipressa and Poggio climbs. Declercq may very well have stayed on the front all the way to the third, Capo di Berta, but team sprinter Sam Bennet punctured (flat tire) and the team was pulled off the front to help him back into the action. Seems to me that the team has really inopportune punctures at times. Bennet did make it back on, but the shots of him laboring in a giant gear on the Berta showed a rider already at his limits. It was now up to Alaphilippe to carry home the work of Tim Declercq.

One could very well say that not much happened in this Milano Sanremo, just eight men in front chased by three behind with a tailing peloton, but I found it all truly exciting as the tension built, the end came ever-closer, the peloton ever-angrier and the ‘frotting’ or shoving for position ever-more intense. The way the peloton swarmed from the left to the right then back again, all at 60kph, all precariously balanced mere millimeters away from phone poles and parked cars, the riders smashing together during the accelerations into the turns and onto the two final climbs, all of that had me jumping out of my skin. The Ineos-Grenadiers, with Luke Rowe then Pippo Ganna pounding the front were so strong but had no closer. Wout van Aert used up his team too early, had no one left for the final sprint. Van der Poel seemed slightly off, Alaphilppe a bit unsure. I think it was the presence of the Pocket Rocket, Caleb Ewen, who rode the Poggio in the top five positions the entire time that threw them all off. The Aussie was the fastest man and he really wasn’t supposed to be there with those strong men on the climb. But he was and it blew their collective minds.

There’s no opportunist like a good Belgian and Jasper Stuyven, seeing the confusion, took perfect advantage of it with a precise attack at the bottom of the climb just two kilometers to the finish. Dane Søren Kragh Andersen bridged to him, foolishly worked just enough to be dumped before the line, the savvy Belgian now winner of two WorldTour races, this Milano Sanremo on top of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in 2020. Stuyven is a Trek lifer, having started with Lance Armstrong’s Bontrager Livestrong team as an amateur in 2012, contracted with Trek through 2022.  A slowly maturing wine sort, with a Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne here, a Deutchland Tour there, the man from Leuven has now completely repaid Waterloo’s 11-years of faith in his abilities.