Why Sanremo is Pogacar’s perfect problem

Yet Sanremo is different. It remains, paradoxically, the simplest Monument to finish and the hardest to win. That is what makes it both profoundly boring and completely gripping. Everyone knows what is going to happen while having no idea what is going to happen. And what makes this particular duel so fascinating is that the Venn diagram of attributes required to win Sanremo offers perhaps the closest possible meeting point between Pogačar and Van der Poel; the race lands almost perfectly in the overlap of their respective arsenals.

The magical ingredient, and the reason these recent editions of Milan-Sanremo have felt so charged, is that Tadej Pogačar has not won it. It feels almost anathema to write that about a rider who has won almost everything, but Sanremo, and Paris-Roubaix, still sit just beyond his reach. For many champions of his stature, and with his Tour de France pedigree, that alone might have been enough to leave it alone. To decide it was not worth the effort, or not worth the risk, or simply too resistant to be worth bending a season around. 

That, really, is what we had grown used to in the modern era: all-round greatness with limits, even self-imposed ones. Bernard Hinault, in the 1980s, was the last Tour winner who looked genuinely capable of mastering every Monument. That version of the champion had not disappeared entirely, but it had begun to feel historical rather than living. Then Pogačar decided otherwise.

And maybe that is the most revealing thing about his relationship with this race. Not that he needs to win Milan-Sanremo, but that he wants to play with the problem of it. I came across this quote recently: “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the experience of overcoming them.” Sanremo is precisely that for Pogačar: a game of sorts, an unnecessary obstacle in the purest sense. 

He does not need it to validate his greatness. His palmarès is already secure. His legacy does not depend on the Cipressa or the Poggio, but that is exactly why it matters. It is a race that refuses to yield easily to his gifts, a race that asks him to solve something more delicate than simply being the strongest. He returns to it because the difficulty is the point, because for a rider like Pogačar the game is not only in winning, but in finding a way to win something that does not naturally belong to him.

That is what makes Milan-Sanremo such a compelling lens through which to view Pogačar. Most races bend, eventually, towards the strongest rider. Over enough terrain, enough repeated effort, enough accumulated fatigue, hierarchy tends to impose itself. The best rider usually finds a way to make the race reflect his superiority. Sanremo refuses to do that cleanly. It withholds certainty. It preserves ambiguity deeper into the finale than almost any other major race, and in doing so diminishes the authority of raw strength alone.

That is not to say strength does not matter. Of course it does. It always does. And the existence of Sanremo, and its absence from his palmarès, may even be making Pogačar stronger. Because the only way he can win it is by going faster than anyone has ever gone before on the Cipressa, including himself. In order to win Sanremo, he has to compete against himself, not just Mathieu van der Poel.

And that is where Van der Poel becomes such an important part of the story. Not simply because he is one of the few riders capable of following Pogačar in the decisive moment, but because he embodies the sort of rider Sanremo has always loved: explosive but composed, powerful without needing to force order onto chaos too soon. He has options. Pogačar often seems to race as though he wants to reveal the truth of things; Van der Poel can do the same, yet is equally comfortable leaving the race unresolved until the final possible instant. In Milan-Sanremo, that difference is important.

It’s important because the race is not really designed to reward domination in its purest form. The climbs are too short, the peloton too strong, the finish too plausible for too many different kinds of rider. The strongest man can animate Sanremo, can shape it, can even break it open, but still not fully own it. That is why Pogačar’s presence has transformed the race without yet conquering it. He has made Sanremo more violent, more selective, more honest in one sense; yet still it remains just evasive enough to deny him.

And maybe that is exactly why he keeps coming back. Because there is a difference between a race that suits you and a race that fascinates you. Most champions prefer the former. Pogačar seems energised by the latter. He does not just want to win races that conform to his nature; he wants to test whether his nature can be expanded to include them. Sanremo offers him that possibility every March. He’s in his own great game, and as long as Sanremo exists, Pogačar will play.

David Millar is a former British professional cyclist best known for his success in time trials and his candid role in cycling’s modern era. He is the only British cyclist to have worn all four jerseys from the Tour de France and all three of the leader’s jerseys in the Grand Tours. Riding for teams such as Cofidis and Team Garmin, he was valued both for his individual performances against the clock and for his leadership within the peloton. Nowadays, he is Chief Brand Officer at Factor.