Tadej Pogacar solves Milan-Sanremo the way only he knows how

All the talk in the build-up was about how Tadej Pogačar might finally find a way to solve the maddening riddle of Milan-Sanremo, the Classic that had bewitched him and repelled him over the previous four years.

Everyone already knew, of course, that code breaking has never really been Pogačar’s style, not when he can lean on enough blunt force to blow the doors off even the most intractable safe. 

And in the end, he did it in the most Pogačar way possible, even if his crash before the Cipressa at least ensured that Milan-Sanremo’s unique suspense would remain undefeated even in the face of the most predictable dominance the sport has seen since Eddy Merckx.

Pogačar’s career defies all rational explanation, but his superiority over allcomers has been more or less a constant ever since he shocked the world with his heist at La Planche des Belles Filles on the 2020 Tour de France.

Yes, he lost a couple of Tours to Jonas Vingegaard and Mathieu van der Poel usually competes on the same plane in his preferred Classics, but there is a not-so-tacit acceptance in the peloton that Pogačar is simply stronger than everybody else. For all its variables and subtleties, cycling is also a numbers game, and Pogačar’s astounding power-to-weight ratio regularly takes him to postcodes too exclusive for everybody else.

That’s what made Milan-Sanremo the most compelling race on the Slovenian’s radar in recent years; it offered the closest thing to a Pogačar-proof course in the Classics. Milan-Sanremo has so often been a race of wits rather than watts, a thinking man’s race that has smiled more willingly on the quick thinking of riders like Oscar Freire or a Simon Gerrans than on the raw power of others.

But Pogačar had begun to change that dynamic with his onslaught in recent years, and his attack on the Cipressa twelve months ago was contrary to everything we thought possible in the modern Milan-Sanremo. 

Even though Pogačar lost out to Mathieu van der Poel in the sprint that day, it was clear that he had happened upon his preferred formula, and now he would keep remorselessly applying the sledgehammer in the same spot until he finally forced the door open. Nothing, not even a crash before the Cipressa and the promise of a headwind after it, would divert him from that idea.

On Saturday, Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad was sent out with the same basic gameplan as last year, and they began ramping up the pace in earnest on the Capo Berta in preparation for the inevitable Cipressa offensive.

The shocking thing about this Milan-Sanremo is that they stuck to the playbook even after Pogačar suffered what should have been a race-compromising crash in Imperia, barely 5km from the foot of the Cipressa.

That stretch of road has been Milan-Sanremo’s Straits of Magellan for generations. In 1998, for instance, the challenge of an on-form Frank Vandenbroucke was shipwrecked in a pile-up there, and when Pogačar went down, the assumption was that he had suffered the same fate.

Ten years ago, mind, eventual winner Arnaud Démare somehow scrambled back ashore after he crashed in Imperia, but his triumph came in a sprint on the Via Roma and amid heated debate over the specifics of his long chase back over the Cipressa.

Pogačar, by contrast, simply bounced back up and chased back on at the most fraught juncture of the entire race. The peloton was thundering at pace towards the foot of the Cipressa, and Pogačar had to recoup a gap of more than half a minute. Somehow, he managed to do it before the climb had even begun and without dampening his sharpness for the onslaught to come.

When Brandon McNulty towed Pogačar up the righthand side of the peloton and into the front row, it was clear that UAE Team Emirates-XRG were simply resuming their pre-planned programming. 

With some notable exceptions – the 2022 Tour springs to mind – Pogačar has usually been stronger than any mistakes or mishaps, his sheer power compensating for failings in strategy or shortcomings in luck. That was illustrated forcefully at last year’s Strade Bianche, but Pogačar conjured up a different class of miracle here.

Barely fifteen minutes after he had picked himself off the ground with a series of abrasions to his left side, Pogačar was unleashing an attack of such ferocity that only two of the very best riders in the peloton could even try to follow.

And follow was all Van der Poel and Tom Pidcock could do as Pogačar scorched up the Cipressa in an eye-watering new record time of 8:48. It’s sobering to imagine what Pogačar would have done there without the crash, but he might well have simply soloed clear on the Cipressa and reduced Milan-Sanremo to a procession like those witnessed at Strade Bianche, Il Lombardia, the European Championships, the World Championships, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Flanders over the past twelve months. 

Instead, the combination of Pogačar’s crash and Pidcock’s resilience meant the race maintained its drama all the way to the Via Roma. Van der Poel’s sudden loss of contact at the foot of the Poggio was quite startling in the moment, but perhaps less surprising when it emerged afterwards that he had also come down in the same crash as Pogačar, injuring a hand in the process.

When Pogačar failed to distance Pidcock on the way up, one wondered if the Briton might slip away on the descent, but it wasn’t to be. For all Pidcock’s gifts, Pogačar was never likely to be denied in the two-up sprint here, even if there were only four meagre centimetres in it at the end.

As ever when Pogačar produces one of these routinely supernatural feats, talk quickly turns to that old debate about whether he has now eclipsed Eddy Merckx as the greatest of all-time. Merckx knows the score; he had Fausto Coppi as a yardstick throughout his career. And even now, fully sixty years after Merckx’s first Milan-Sanremo win, there are those who would argue that Coppi remains unsurpassed, regardless of the Belgian’s gaudy numbers.

The same applies for Pogačar. Comparing generations is a fraught business in any sport, but even more so in cycling, where innovations of all shades from one era to the next have tended to blur the picture.

The one certainty is that Pogačar is, by a considerable distance, head and shoulders above every other rider in the current peloton. Even though his winning margin was a narrow one here, the gulf between Pogačar and the rest still seems to be widening. The crash and its effects made it Pogačar’s most dramatic triumph since La Planche des Belles Filles six years ago, but without them, it might have been as inevitable as his Strade Bianche win two weeks ago.

Pogačar looks likely to get even better as the Spring progresses. For those who like some suspense in their Classics, meanwhile, this might have been as good as it gets.