Tadej Pogacar's dominance gives Il Lombardia a First World problem

Back in 1981, Il Lombardia seemed to be facing something of an existential crisis. At the end of a long season, international grandees such as Tour de France champion Bernard Hinault and world champion Freddy Maertens had opted against the Race of the Falling Leaves, and there was a distinct lack of star power on the start list.

The late Gianni Mura mourned the race’s drop in status in the pages of La Repubblica. “The Giro di Lombardia has never had such a mown down field of participants,” Mura wrote. “Those of us who continue to love it are hoping for a great Giro di Lombardia, but it’s not easy to sing ‘Aida’ with so little breath.”

The article, entitled ‘The cycling that eats its children’ placed much of the blame of the length of the calendar and the sheer volume of racing across the year, and the lament has returned at various points and in varying forms over Il Lombardia’s history.

In the 1990s and 2000s, when the race formed the final event of the World Cup, purists decried how men like Michele Bartoli and Paolo Bettini found themselves racing for points rather than victory. In the 2010s, when late-season races in China and the Middle East were added to the calendar, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth at how Il Lombardia was being usurped as the grand finale to the season.

These days, Il Lombardia doesn’t face an existential question so much as a First World problem. What do you do when the best rider in the world keeps turning up to your race and winning it?

Tadej Pogačar returns to Il Lombardia on Saturday, and it already feels inevitable that he will win the race for the fifth successive year. Over the past two weekends, he has cruised to victory at the World Championships and the European Championships, and he warmed up for Il Lombardia by rattling off another ineluctable solo win at Tre Valli Varesine.

The past two seasons also suggest there is no real way of Pogačar-proofing a bike race, and the terrain of Il Lombardia doesn’t lend itself to the concept in any case – at least in its current iteration, where the finale alternates between the rugged hinterland of Como and the rugged hinterland of Bergamo. 

In each scenario, Pogačar has obvious springboards to impose himself on the race. And frankly, even if RCS Sport went back to the future and served up the Milan finish of the late 1980s, with its long, flat run-in, this particular vintage of Pogačar would probably still find a way to win.

And so despite the presence of Remco Evenepoel – by a considerable distance the best of the rest in Kigali and the Drôme-Ardêche – it’s hard to imagine any scenario other than a Pogačar victory in Bergamo on Saturday. Even at this remove, it feels like the only question is how he chooses to do it.

Twelve months ago, Pogačar emulated Fausto Coppi’s 1946-1949 sequence of four consecutive victories in the season-ending Classic. Another win on Saturday would see him become the first rider in history to win the same Monument five times in a row, and it would also see him become the first man to finish on the podium of all five Monuments in the same year.

Then again, every time Pogačar slings his leg over a bike these days, he seems to establish a new milestone. It’s difficult to fathom at this remove, but Pogačar wasn’t even the favourite when he lined up for Il Lombardia in 2021. That honour fell to Primoz Roglic, who was fresh from winning the Vuelta a España, the Giro dell’Emilia and Milano-Torino.

On race day, however, it was Pogačar who proved the strongest, attacking on the Passo di Ganda with 35km to go. Fausto Masnada managed to get across, but the Italian was dispatched in the sprint and Il Lombardia had a novel winner: Pogačar was the first reigning Tour champion to triumph in the race since Bernard Hinault in 1979. He was also the first man since Moreno Argentin in 1987 to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia in the same year.

Back then, such statistics were trotted out with marvel and wonder. Pogačar was serving up a taste of cycling from another era. 

Four years on, however, the menu hasn’t changed, nor has Pogačar’s appetite. Mura lamented how cycling was ‘eating’ its riders back in 1981. These days, the problem is that one rider is eating cycling itself. Pogačar just keeps on winning, and by the time we get to October, there aren’t even scraps left for anybody else.

That’s not to say there won’t be a bike race on Saturday. Evenepoel, in his final outing for Soudal-QuickStep, will put on a show and he will look to apply the lessons of the last weekends to this race. But the Belgian also knows that if Pogačar does the kind of Pogačar things he did at the Worlds and European Championships, the real bike race might end up being for second place.

Indeed, the fiercest contest might even be for third, given the abyss that existed between Evenepoel and the rest on the past two Sundays. 

Paul Seixas (Decathlon-AG2R) will be a man to watch, as will Richard Carapaz, Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) and Julian Alaphilippe (Tudor). All of them will know and accept there is precious little to be done if Pogačar is in the mood – and he invariably is at this race.

At this point in his reign, the fifth Monument of the year has the feel of an exhibition race for Pogačar. Betting against him here would be as foolhardy as Krusty the Clown’s decision to bet against the Harlem Globetrotters.

The lie of the land is very different to what Mura lamented in 1981, but now as then, Il Lombardia still holds a mirror up to the cycling of today. All year, Pogačar has been doing more or less as he pleases. It would be a shock if Il Lombardia doesn’t serve up more of the same. 

With Pogačar, the menu doesn’t change and the service never stops.