The Monuments: Milan - San Remo
Milano–Sanremo, ‘la classica di Primavera, la Classicissima’ : the Spring classic, the classic of classics.
The start of the 1954 edition in Milan (via Cyclingnews)
The first of the five monuments takes place in mid-March, and though it doesn’t mark the start of the season it does signify that serious racing has begun and the warm-up is over. La Primavera is no training ride, at 298km it is by a wide margin the longest day of racing in professional cycling. This extraordinary length is a holdover from a bygone era of super-endurance classics like the epic 560km Bordeaux to Paris (a race so long that the organisers allowed slipstreaming behind cars and motorbikes) and belies the age of the race: it was first run in 1907, and was cancelled on only three occasions during the world wars.
The peloton has to be up early for sign on, photo ops and autographs in the centre of Milan before it processes to the edge of the city and the official start is signalled. From there the route heads South to the coast on wide, smooth A-roads, meeting it near Genova, and then takes the coast road West all the way to San Remo. For the first 100km, the route is pancake flat, but that does not mean it is easy. Eddy Merckx, winner of La Primavera a record 7 times, once remarked that Milan - San Remo was so hard because it was so straight. In the twisting, turning races of his Belgian homeland, he explained, weaker riders could recover as the pack coasted through corners, but on the straight roads of Italy there could be no hiding. Hour upon hour of forging ahead at full race pace puts paid to the ambitions of anyone who comes to Milan without their best form.
Just before its half-way point the race crests its first major obstacle, the Passo del Turchino. In years gone by the slow steady climb to 532m was a determining factor, but nowadays it merely serves to put a little more fatigue into the legs of the hopefuls. The decisive hills come more than 100km further on, and it is these late climbs that shape the race and make it a fantastic spectacle. After hopping over the tiny Capo Mele and Capo Cervo, and the slighty less tiny Capo Berta, the riders enter the final 30km and face two hills that despite their brevity and shallow inclines are no less renowned than the fabled high mountain passes of the Tour de France.
The peloton struggles up the Poggio (via PezCyclingNews)
These two climbs, the Cipressa and the Poggio di Sanremo, serve to make la Classicissima one of the most finely balanced and unpredictable races of the season. One-day races follow nearly the same route every year, so most of them tend to be won by a certain type of rider, and it is relatively easy to pick favourites for any given edition. Take the Fleche Wallonne, a classic that takes place in the Ardennes region of northern Europe: every year it finishes on the short but brutally steep climb of the Mur de Huy, so it is almost always won by the rider who has the strongest uphill sprint on the day.
No such predictions can be made about Milan - San Remo. One might expect a race with no long or steep climbs and a flat finale to end in a mass sprint, a huge group coming to the finish line together and the fastest men fighting for the win, but the Cipressa and the Poggio prevent this. These two seemingly easy climbs come after six hours of hard racing and are not over until six kilometres from the finish, serving to break the legs of any sprinter that has not saved his strength and acting as a launching pad for opportunistic attacks.
The 3km descent of the Poggio and the 3 flat kilometres that follow it provide perhaps the most exciting ten minutes of action in all of cycling. Usually a small group of riders gets away on the climb and drops like a stone down the other side, taking huge risks on the switchback descent to preserve their advantage, while behind the teams of the big sprinters try to organise themselves and chase down the breakaway. Whether they will succeed or not is never certain until the last moment.
Mark Cavendish wins by inches in 2009 (via Cyclingweekly)
In the past decade alone the race has seen sprint finishes from groups as large as 80 riders and as small as 30, an attack on the Poggio that won by 10 seconds as well as another that won by less than a bike length, and a win from a surprise attack on the flat run-in. The two most recent editions have seen the main field split dramatically on a hill that was added to the second half of the route in 2008, which this year resulted in a group of 44 riders staying away for the remaining 90km and gradually being whittled down to less than 10 by the finish.
This unpredictability is what makes Milan - San Remo such an engaging race year after year. The fans love it, so the riders love it, so it has endured for more than a century, and it is clear that the race organisers understand what makes this event more than just another classic. When they saw that mass sprint finishes were becoming more common, they reacted by toughening the route ever so slightly and managed to inject yet more variety in to the race without altering its character beyond all recognition. If they can ensure the race stays exciting whilst remaining faithful to its history and legacy then La Classicissima will surely still be run in March a hundred years hence.
