The race reports following each of the past 29 editions of the men’s Milan–San Remo, the first monument classic of the cycling season, are more or less identical, save for the proper nouns. The peloton races down from Milan onto the coast of the Ligurian Sea for like six hours and, after being softened up by all that racing through foreboding spring conditions and one ascent of the Cipressa around 20 kilometers from the line, the race is decided by the ascent and descent of the Poggio, a sinuous and otherwise unremarkable climb made totally decisive by all that softening up. Oddly, the race’s structural predictability (matched only by La Fleche Wallone) lends itself to an unpredictability of outcome. You never knew who will win, but you know how they will win.
That is, until this past weekend’s men’s race, which not only ended with Mathieu van der Poel repeating his 2023 triumph, but saw a wholly different kind of finish. It was the best Milan–San Remo I’ve seen in my time watching pro cycling, a testament to the greatness of both van der Poel and Tadej Pogacar, and the possibility of their rivalry.
Until van der Poel, no rider had repeated since three-time winner Oscar Freire won his third in 2010. A remarkable variety of riders have won La Classicissima in that intervening period; pure sprinters like Mark Cavendish, pure climbers like Michal Kwiatkowski, pure downhill madmen like Matej Mohoric, and even a Grand Tour winner in Vincenzo Nibali. (The women’s edition, the first in 20 years, was somewhat disappointing because the same finale was not preceded by an equally arduous procession, drawing complaints from riders. Lorena Wiebes, the best sprinter in the world, won somewhat anticlimactically.) This is what makes a rider like Pogacar targeting a race like MSR one of the most enticing parts of the classics season.
Yes, he can reliably spend the spring dominating the one-day races most suited to him, like Liege–Bastogne–Liege or Strade Bianche, year after year, but now that he’s racked up so many monuments and Tour de France yellow jerseys, Pogacar’s early-season focus is on filling out the rest of his résumé. He’s the best rider in the sport, though part of what makes him so great is his defiance of specificity. He wants to win everything, everywhere, pushing the absolute limit of variety in a sport defined by hyper-specialization. That means winning the two monument classics least suited to his talents, MSR and Paris–Roubaix. That means, in other words, confronting van der Poel on his turf.
Van der Poel is purpose-built for the most difficult races on the calendar. He’s huge, so he can survive on the cobbles, he has tremendous tactical nous, so he can reliably make the right decisions in the heat of the fight, and he is one of the few riders in the world who can match Pogacar’s short-term burst power on medium-steep climbs. The two rivals are so different in many ways—you will never see van der Poel winning a Grand Tour mountain stage, nor Pogacar winning a mass, flat sprint—though they are each so proficient in their areas of expertise that the overlap of races they both want to win makes for some of the best racing on the calendar. The few times each man has stepped to the starting line determined to destroy the other have led to incredible rides, like van der Poel’s world-bestriding 2023 World Championships win or Pogacar’s 2024 Tour of Flanders escape, though they are still different enough that those occasions when they meet on something like a level playing field are still frustratingly rare. Last year’s Liege–Bastogne–Liege, for example, was supposed to be a seismic showdown, though van der Poel transparently was not up to challenge Pogacar on the spiky Ardennes terrain (he’s still good enough that his B-plus effort nonetheless got him on the podium).
The pressure of this competitive dynamic broke the mold in this year’s MSR, as the two superstars escaped well before the Poggio, on the Cipressa. Pogacar’s team cranked up the pressure, with Jhonatan Narváez putting in a huge shift, and then Pogacar unleashed a terrifying, predictable attack that shredded the peloton, leaving a huge group of the best riders in the world with their heads down in pain. His team put out an unusually revealing look from inside the team bus that showed that the attack was planned down to the meter. Only van der Poel and Filippo Ganna could follow, setting up a tense finale in which the two superstars exchanged heavy blows, only ever dislodging Ganna and only ever temporarily, all the way through the final two climbs and the descent off the Poggio.
Here they were, with one guy for company, trying to destroy each other. This is everything fans could have dreamed of, a pure power fight. MSR had not been decided on the Cipressa since 1996, and the three escapees powered to a 43-second margin unseen anywhere in the top-ten since 1991 (that race was extremely choppy and was wholly defined by a series of crashes.) Pogacar and van der Poel broke a 29-year-old record on the Cipressa, and though they rode away from history, they could not ride away from each other. The best moment was van der Poel casually taking a bottle while Pogi was attacking on the Poggio. After Pogacar smartly eased up to force van der Poel to lead out the sprint, he gambled by giving his rival a few bike lengths in an attempt to trick Ganna into leading him out. That was probably the only way he could beat van der Poel in a straight-up sprint on a flat road, but van der Poel played the finale to perfection, stringing his rivals out across the road and hitting his initial burst hard enough to keep both of them off his wheel. Ganna, the picture of persistence, took second.
This might be as good as it gets, since Pogacar will probably not risk his summer by voluntarily threshing himself on the Paris–Roubaix cobbles. If that’s the case, fans have still been treated to a masterpiece. Someday, Pogacar will try for the Hell of the North. All we can hope for is that it happens during van der Poel’s prime.
