A roundtable discussion of the key questions facing the contenders for the first Monument of the season.
Cor Vos
In an age where the biggest races are in increasing danger of being all too predictable, Milan-San Remo stands out as one of the top prizes on the calendar that still feels like an open-ended affair. No one can say for sure when the winning move will go or if anyone will even be able to get clear in a finale perfectly balanced on the razor’s edge between favoring the attackers and the fast finishers.
That’s true even as Mathieu van der Poel goes for his third career win in the event on Saturday, where his biggest rival will be the peloton’s biggest star – who has not yet managed to crack this particular nut. Tadej Pogačar is so often the odds-on favorite that it’s striking when, one day out from the race, the bookmakers don’t actually favor one single rider over the field.
That leaves plenty of room for prognosticators to maneuver, and we’re taking full advantage of the opportunity. Heading into the season’s first Monument, we (Dane Cash and Joe Lindsey) debate some of the key questions that face the big players…
Question 1: Pogačar has tried over and over again to take Milan-San Remo without success. Can he actually win?
Joe Lindsey: Asking whether Tadej Pogačar can win a race feels like an extremely strange question. But this is Milan-San Remo, where I think consensus is settling that it may be the hardest race of all for him to solve, simply because it’s not that conventionally hard. Yes, it’s long, but the race has just over 2,500 meters of climbing over 298 km, which counts as pretty gentle by today’s WorldTour standards.
But I’m wondering if this year’s M-SR is Pogačar’s best shot yet. In five tries, he’s finished no lower than 12th, and has been third the past two editions. I think this year is promising partly because the field is a touch thinned. Perennial M-SR hopeful Michael Matthews is out. Previous winner Wout van Aert and reliable top-10 finisher Mads Pedersen are still coming back on form after early-season injuries.
Milan-San Remo feels a bit like World Cup Downhill skiing, where there’s a sweet spot of having enough experience with the course to have sorted out the tactical nous required, but fresh legs. So, tactical chops: If you look at the startlist, there are just 18 riders out of 170 starters who have ever finished top-10 here. Fresh legs: Of former winners on the startlist, four – John Degenkolb, Michał Kwiatkowski, Julian Alaphilippe and Jasper Stuyven – are all 33 or older and likely are outside threats at most, if we’re being generous.
There’s always a surprise top-5 finisher here so you can’t go purely on past results. But one thing going for Pogačar is that there just aren’t that many riders who he and his team have to mark. Short answer: Absolutely he can win. Whether he will? That’s what we’re all here to see, right?
Dane Cash: In the spirit of sports talk radio, I know I am supposed to disagree here, and frankly, there was a time when I saw San Remo as an insurmountable challenge for Pogačar. There’s video evidence of me saying something along those lines out there in the How the Race was Won ether. And yet …
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