Tadej Pogacar has changed Milan-Sanremo - now can he win it?

Cycling in the 2020s often seems unrecognisable from what came before, but, reassuringly, Milan-Sanremo is still just about retaining its singular allure as the Classic that cannot be tamed by raw strength alone.

That might yet change on Saturday, but regardless of the outcome, Pogačar has already succeeded in shifting the tone of the entire race. Four years ago, on the eve of his second appearance and his first serious tilt at victory, L’Équipe carried a survey in which pro riders had voted Milan-Sanremo as the least popular of the five Monuments. On Friday morning, the same newspaper ran a story if asking Milan-Sanremo had now become “the sexiest race of the season.” What a difference one man’s mission can make.

For many, of course, Milan-Sanremo was already the jewel of the calendar, not least because it’s always been a ritual as much as a race. The long trundle from the frigid air of the northern Italian plain over the Turchino and towards the blue skies and bobbing waves of the Riviera marks the gentle passage from winter to spring. 

The beauty of the day lies largely in the anticipation. There has always been something vaguely Beckettian about the long wait for a languid ritual to morph into the tensest and most suspenseful bike race imaginable. And when the dust settles afterwards, there has always been the pleasing sense that the narrative could just as easily have gone in any number of different directions, like a novel by Sanremo’s great literary son, Italo Calvino.

Those qualities remain today, but in stretching the limits of what we thought was possible for a contender to try at the modern Milan-Sanremo, Pogačar has also succeeded in sweeping away a tranche of the variables that made this the most compelling Classic of them all in the first place.

Traditionally, Milan-Sanremo had a longer list of bona fide contenders than any other Classic. In the modern era, when the routes of races like the Tour of Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège seemed increasingly tilted towards rewarding the strongest man, guile still weighed heavily in the equation at Milan-Sanremo, as winners like Matthew Goss, Simon Gerrans and Gerald Ciolek could testify. In that breathless finale, speed of thought was just as important as strength of legs.

Over the past four years, the willingness of Pogačar and his UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad to lift the intensity earlier and earlier in the day has increasingly made this a race for the strongmen. As we pointed out earlier in the week, Pogačar’s onslaughts have actually helped Mathieu van der Poel to his two wins by simplifying the tactical considerations and bypassing the delicate chain of split-second decisions that tripped up favourites like Peter Sagan over the years.

Yes, Jasper Philipsen won in 2024, but largely because his teammate Van der Poel was on hand to serve as a counterweight to Pogačar. The Dutchman’s preternatural strength then allowed him to make multiple efforts to shut down gaps for Philipsen in the closing kilometres, perhaps the most virtuoso supporting performance ever produced at Milan-Sanremo.

In that light, most analysts have, very understandably, couched this race as a straight duel between the two strongest riders in the peloton, Pogačar and Van der Poel. Rather than standing as a race apart, La Primavera now looks like the first instalment in a three-part contest between the Big Two that also takes in the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. 

Filippo Ganna, Wout van Aert and Tom Pidcock are among those mentioned in some quarters as potential winners, but only if something goes awry for Pogačar and Van der Poel. The sprinters, a constituency that enjoyed so many periods of dominance across the history of the race, now line up more in hope than expectation. Some don’t bother lining up at all, and few could quibble with Arnaud De Lie’s reasoning for not making the trip.

On his excellent Substack, the cycling historian Cillian Kelly this week pushed against the prevailing Pogačar versus Van der Poel consensus by playfully suggesting that analysts were “terrible at remembering what happened in Milan-Sanremo” and pointing to the long history of riders not repeating their winning moves at La Primavera year upon year. 

The counterargument to that point, however, is that perhaps everybody remembers very precisely what Milan-Sanremo used to be like, and they can see that with their own eyes how the terms of engagement have changed so radically in the 2020s. 

That doesn’t guarantee that Pogačar or Van der Poel will win on Saturday by bludgeoning clear on the Cipressa, of course, but it has shifted the expectations of riders and pundits alike coming into the race. 

When Vincenzo Nibali attacked on the Cipressa in 2014, it was decried as a folly. In 2026, Pogačar’s attack there is already discussed as an inevitability. This isn’t your grandfather’s Milan-Sanremo.

Then again, Milan-Sanremo, like all the Classics, has always had periods of flux. The very idea of bringing a bike race 300km from Milan to Sanremo only came into being at all because the Milan-Aqui-Sanremo motoring rally had been a commercial failure. In the early decades, it was a race of endurance. Eugene Christophe won by over an hour in 1910 and modern cycling’s first champion, Fausto Coppi, won by 14 minutes in 1946.

It gradually developed into a race of speed, and the dominance of fast foreign finishers in the 1950s saw the Poggio introduced to boost home hopes. The emergence of one Eddy Merckx, however, helped ensure Italy would endure a 17-year drought before Michele Dancelli’s 1970 win.

The addition of the Cipressa in 1982 tipped the balance from the sprinters still further until they regained the upper hand in the late 1990s. From there until the 2020s, it was the most pleasingly balanced of all the Classics, with minor shifts in wind conditions often tipping the scales in the seemingly eternal contest between sprinters and puncheurs.

The 2020s, and more specifically, Pogačar’s interest in Sanremo, have marked a tectonic shift. With all the usual caveats about differing wind conditions and no two races being the same, the average speeds on the Cipressa still tell us something about what’s going on. In 2020, the Sanremo peloton averaged 32.57kph on the climb, precisely the same as Nibali back in 2014. In 2025, Pogačar cruised up the Cipressa at an average speed of 37.8kph, shattering the record set by Gabriele Colombo and Alexandre Gontchenkov in 1996.

For the past four years, Pogačar has dominated the discussion in the build-up to Milan-Sanremo and then dictated the terms of engagement in the race itself. Even allowing for the prevailing wind conditions, that looks set to continue on Saturday. Pogačar might or might not win Milan-Sanremo, but he has already changed it.