Key Takeaways: Milano-Sanremo
Key Takeaways: Milano-Sanremo
Breaking down the key points from the first Monument of the season, how it was won, what went wrong for certain pre-race favorites & what it teaches us about the rest of the season
If there was any lingering doubt about whether the 2024 season was ‘officially’ underway, it was put to bed on Saturday when a handful of the sport’s elite talents battled for supremacy at the first one-day Monument of 2024, Milano-Sanremo. Despite its 288-kilometer course featuring fairly tedious and almost shockingly unselective terrain, the race’s final two climbs, the Cipressa and Poggio, climbed at, or above, record-breaking speeds, left a small, select group of riders that produced the thrilling finale that featured a battle between select attackers and a greatly reduced peloton. In the end, no amount of vicious attacking from Tadej Pogačar, whose UAE team struggled to set up the superstar for a knockout blow the same way they did recently at Strade Bianche, could shake Alpecin-Deceuninck’s Jasper Philipsen, who, behind an incredibly selfless leadout from his teammate Mathieu van der Poel, edged Michael Matthews with a perfectly executed bike throw to win the biggest victory of his career for an Alpecin team that has emerged as the gold-standard for one-day teamwork.
Milano-Sanremo 2024 Top Ten:
1) Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) +0
2) Michael Matthews (Jayco-Alula) +0
3) Tadej Pogačar (UAE) +0
4) Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) +0
5) Alberto Bettiol (EF) +0
6) Matej Mohorič (Bahrain) +0
7) Maxim Van Gils (Lotto) +0
8) Jasper Stuyven (Lidl-Trek)
9) Julian Alaphilippe (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
10) Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) +0
To expand on my initial Milano-Sanremo thoughts from Saturday after the race, I’ve broken down the key takeaways from the early-season Italian Monument below:
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Race Notebook
29.2km-to-go: Heading into the penultimate climb of the day, the Cipressa, Lidl-Trek is on the front of the peloton, while the UAE team of Tadej Pogačar, who spent the week before the race talking about the secret to a Pogačar victory being them riding the Cipressa as fast as possible, aren’t present at the front.
26.3km: Pogačar gets to the front, but only has a single teammate to set a hard tempo in front of him. Meanwhile, the rest of his UAE team is stuck in the group behind and are putting out a massive amount of energy to ride up the side of the group and get back to the front. Assuming their teammate is riding extremely hard on the front (holding ≈450 watts), the power required to ride up the side in the wind must be absolutely massive.
26.1km: Pogačar’s UAE teammates finally make it to the front, but the energy expenditure to make up the places they surrendered due to poor positioning has left them gassed and unable to ride the steady and hard pace they originally had in mind.
23.1km: As a result of this, the group is still massive at the front as they near the top of the climb. Pogačar is clearly not happy with this considering he signals to his lone remaining teammate, Tim Wellens, to push as hard as he can up and over the top in an attempt to shed the fastest sprinters in this group. Wellens does a good job of this, but, with UAE lacking any remaining teammates at this point, they lack the firepower to keep the pace fast on the flat section between the Cipressa and the final climb, the Poggio.
17.9km: As soon as they get off the descent of the Cipressa, the pace immediately comes off in the front group due to UAE lacking the numbers to keep the pressure on, thus essentially nullifying the work they did on the preceding climb. We can see how easy the pace is in the front group due to the fact that Davide Bais, who has been out front all day in the breakaway, is able to ride off the front, and Tom Pidcock feels comfortable enough to sit up and pee.
7.7km: Once on the slopes of the Poggio, Wellens gets back to the front to set a hard pace for Pogačar to attack off of. However, as we see with Mathieu van der Poel looking untroubled behind, with Wellens having just set the pace on the Cipressa and letting everyone recover on the flat section between the climbs, making any difference will be difficult.
6.5km: Pogačar launches a hard attack but is immediately marked by a heads-up Van der Poel, Alberto Bettiol, and Filippo Ganna. On the back of the group, Jasper Philipsen is dangling in last wheel, but is doing an amazing job of hanging with the elite front group.
5.8km: In a last-ditch attempt, Pogačar launches another extremely strong attack with room running out at the top of the climb. Philipsen continues to ignore these attacks and keep his pace as high and steady as possible near the back of the group.
5.5km: Pogačar has a gap at the top of the climb, but, despite setting a record time on the climb, due to the slow pace leading into it and the lack of runway to launch an attack, Van der Poel is right behind him, while a Ganna-led chase group, which includes Jasper Philipsen, is just a few more seconds behind.
3.7km: Pogačar does a decent job of pressing down the descent, but Van der Poel, despite struggling to hold the wheel at times, is marking him. Tom Pidcock, through his incredible technical skill, slices down the descent and bridges the gap to the leaders. In a perfect world, if he could get by the two leaders, he could leverage his superior descending skills to open up a gap. But, Van der Poel smartly closes the door on Pidcock, which keeps him from getting through in the corner.
2.3km: At the bottom of the descent, Pidcock has pulled off the front while Van der Poel, clearly looking to hold up the group while his teammate Philipsen catches back on. Matej Mohorič attempts to take advantage of this brief stalemate by attacking.
1.9km: While his attack looked promising at first, once Philipsen catches on, Van der Poel immediately gets to the front and sets a moto-esque high pace that keeps Mohorič from opening up a large gap.
1km-500m: With Van der Poel still on the front setting a hard pace, Tom Pidcock launches a late-attack/early sprint to bridge up to, and pass, a dangling Matteo Sobrero (who attacked just as Mohorič was caught). While this move would normally have a chance of success, the near-absurd high pace of Van der Poel keeps Pidcock from getting the necessary separation.
250m: Pidcock is reeled in just as Jasper Stuyven peels off, and his teammate Mads Pedersen opens his sprint. Michael Matthews launches on the other side of the road with Jasper Philipsen right in his wheel.
Finish: Matthews, who (very sportingly) passes up a chance to ride Philipsen into the barriers to keep him from passing, surges toward the line and, despite having his shoulders ahead of Philipsen’s, is beaten due to a perfect bike throw from Philipsen. Pogačar impressively finishes third after holding his own against the much-heavier sprinters.
Five Key Takeaways:
1) Jasper Philipsen & Alpecin: In the course of just a few kilometers at the end of Saturday’s race, the 26-year-old Belgian was able to recast his early-season 2024 campaign from somewhat disappointing to a deftly calculated masterclass build into the biggest win of his career. After looking sluggish and off-the-pace at the Classics Opening Weekend (Omloop/Kuurne) and off-his-best following a crash at the recent Tirreno-Adriatico stage race, Philipsen looked unshakeable during the extremely fast ascent of the Poggio and confident as he sat in the wheels and let his superstar domestique-for-the-day Mathieu van der Poel close gaps before he launched his winning sprint.
Outside of Philipsen’s incredible climbing performance and strong sprint after more than six hours of racing, the collective strength of his Alpecin-Deceuninck team and the seamless coordination with his teammate Van der Poel were the reasons for his surprise win.
While it may look slightly odd (not to mention rankling traditionalists) for a superstar of the sport to be throwing away a chance of a Monument victory to close gaps for a teammate (especially one that is out of contract at the end of the season), this is a trademark of the flat organization structure implemented by Team Manager Christoph Roodhooft that has paid major dividends and seen the team punch far above their budget in the last few seasons.
Some might take issue with their ultra-conservative tactic of having Van der Poel set a hard pace on the front to ensure a sprint finish, versus attacking to create a ‘reverse leadout’ that would have given both himself and Philipsen a chance of winning, the team’s results clearly speak for themselves. Since 2020, they have won five Monuments, which is astonishing when we consider that over the same time period, Soudal-QuickStep has three, Visma has two, and Ineos has one.
Philipsen, for his part, is turning into one of the sport’s most prolific winners and a bonafide leader option in major one-day races.
Through 2022 and 2023, he trailed only Tadej Pogačar in pro wins (33 vs 28), and was tied with Remco Evenepoel in second place.
Since striking out at the 2021 Tour de France, where he finished on the podium six times without a single win, Philipsen has won 36 times, with nine Grand Tour stage wins and, most impressively, two one-day Monument podium finishes.
2) Tadej Pogačar & UAE: Judging from their pronouncements of riding an almost-absurd sub-nine-minute Cipressa throughout the week, UAE had clearly envisaged themselves lining up a high-speed train on the day’s penultimate climb to either launch a successful Pogačar solo attack, just like at the recent Strade Bianche, or dent the legs of his rivals to the extent that he would be able to ride clear on the final climb, the Poggio. But, when the rubber hit the road, their overly telegraphed move fell apart almost immediately, with Pogačar’s UAE teammates unable to position themselves on the front heading into the Cipressa, which left the young Isaac del Toro and Tim Wellens setting a hard pace on the front for Pogačar, but with little other support and nobody remaining to keep the pace high on the ensuing flats.
While Del Toro’s pace was high enough to thin down the bunch, it wasn’t hard enough to drop any other serious favorites, which only served to fatigue and ultimately drop his UAE teammates.
This high pace slowed the race between the two final climbs (Cipressa and Poggio) since the small front group lacked enough pacemakers to keep the pace high. The riders up front slowed up and waited for their teammates to chase on from behind, and the pace got so sluggish that Tom Pidcock felt comfortable enough to take time to pee.
This slowing likely contributed to the fact that Pogačar was unable to get clear despite the ascent of the Cipressa being one of the fastest in recent years and the lead group setting a record time up the Poggio.
Ultimately, due to team-wide tactical errors and physical underperformance, their plan of a high pace on the Cipressa only had the effect of thinning out their own team, which actually slowed the pace on the ensuing climb of the Poggio since they had fewer riders left to set a hard pace, which meant Pogačar couldn’t get the separation he needed when launching his attack near the top.
UAE’s positioning issues were likely somewhat related to their decision to send strong climbers instead of powerful rouleurs (like Nils Politt) to explode the race on the Cipressa, which isn’t steep or long enough to favor featherweight climbers. Even if this attempt was executed perfectly, I’m still not certain it made any sense and only decreased Pogačar’s chances of victory.
For example, even if Pogačar had been able to launch off a strong UAE pace on the Cipressa and get clear, the relatively small amount of time dropped riders loose on the high-speed climb means that his rivals could have regrouped and chased with their teams (like Mads Pedersen and Lidl-Trek) on the flat before the Poggio, and likely would have caught the then exhausted Pogačar on the final, ultra-high-speed climb.
And, if UAE had set a nuclear sub-nine-minute pace on the Cipressa and Pogačar had refrained from an attack, it stands to reason that he, and his rivals, would have had few to no teammates remaining in the group when they crested the climb and would have been forced to attack off a much slower attack, and would have been followed by Van der Poel, who never truly looked under pressure over the final two climbs, and reeled in by Tom Pidcock, who was able to effortlessly close a large gap on the descent.
In the end, Pogačar’s best chance of winning this race was almost certainly going to come from a strong, but controlled pace on the Cipressa followed by a steady, hard pace to the Poggio to keep everyone who made it over with them on the limit, but launching an attack near the top of the climb, set up by a nuclear pace from the UAE teammates, after which he would have to hold a razor-thin lead to the finish line.
3) Milano-Sanremo remains the calendar’s most befuddling one-day race: Despite, or perhaps because of, featuring by far the easier course of the five one-day Monuments and concentrating all of its action within the final few minutes, advances in tactical, equipment, and fitness have made the marathon Italian race no more predictable, which means that it remains an almost ethereal event that requires even the biggest stars to solve a near-impossible puzzle, while going full speed, if they want a chance to win.
In contrast to Monuments like the Tour of Flanders, Il Lombardia, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, which have become less about in-race tactics and more about simply being the strongest rider on the day, Milano-Sanremo stands with Paris-Roubaix as throwback one-day events that are still capable of serving up a long list of potential winners.
Oddly, after years of debate and complaints about the lack of climbing features on the course, the aggressive and faster brand of modern racing we are currently experiencing has seemed to bring the ‘too easy’ course to life.
Even as the race, which used to push close to eight hours of racing, shrinks down to just over six hours with the increased speeds of modern racing, it still continues to mystify and deny even the most talented riders, like Tadej Pogačar, Tom Boonen, and Peter Sagan, victories, while rewarding the tactical patience of others.
4) Michael Matthews & Jayco: After a shockingly good, somewhat out-of-nowhere performance, the veteran Australian, following his sixth career top ten at Sanremo, was left with yet another agonizingly close podium finish at the Monument he is most suited to win that saw him continue to build his case to be the best rider never to win a Monument.
On the positive side, Matthews bounced back from leaving Paris-Nice last week due to illness to unleash an incredible ride against some of the sport’s biggest young talents, such as Pogačar, Pidcock, and Van der Poel.
Additionally, the 33-year-old displayed impressive tactical nous and showed that he has clearly learned to ride ‘a la Sagan’ in these ultra-long events that have a high chance of coming down to a sprint finish by staying as low-profile as possible throughout the entire race, hiding in the wheels, and making sure his only effort was during the final sprint.
On the downside, he was forced to freelance on rivals' wheels due to his Jayco-Alula team sitting near or directly at the back of the group through the most important parts of the race. Had he had a rider in the front group who could give him a slightly cleaner leadout and allow him to stay in the draft a little longer, perhaps it would have given him just enough of an advantage over Philipsen.
Luke Plapp, who was sitting last wheel for a large portion of the race, most notably heading into the Cipressa and Poggio, would have been a massive asset on the Via Roma.
5) Julian Alaphilippe, Tom Pidcock, Alberto Bettiol, Matteo Sobrero & Maxim van Gils: Behind the high-speed drama of the reduced bunch sprint on the Via Roma, there were a few notable storylines buried in the results.
Julian Alaphilippe, who got his best Monument result in three seasons, despite sprinting on a flat tire, flashed signs that the two-time World Champion could have a few major results up his sleeve later this season (Pro cycling’s staff writers are already sketching out a potential storybook comeback at the 2024 Paris Olympics).
Alberto Bettiol bagged his first top ten at a Monument since winning the 2019 Tour of Flanders with an incredible and confident ride to finish 5th.
Tom Pidcock, the 24-year-old off-road wunderkind, has had a shaky twelve months since winning last year’s Strade Bianche, but he looked potentially better than ever when he leveraged his bike handling skills to bridge to Pogačar and Van der Poel on the Poggio’s descent and set up a very strong late-race attack that maximized his chances of victory and very nearly delivered him a major win.
Had he been able to sneak by Pogačar and Van der Poel on the downhill, his massive speed differential would have likely allowed him to open an uncloseable gap.
Matteo Sobrero signaled he had officially completed his transformation from time trial specialist to one-day racer by finishing in 12th place to score his best career result in a WorldTour-level one-day race. Considering the new Bora-Hansgrohe arrival could have spoiled the day for the sprinters if not for the presence of Van der Poel, keep an eye out for him later in the year.
However, the down-ballot result that stood out to me the most was Maxim Van Gils's performance. With only three pro wins to his name, he finished 7th in an incredibly select lead group.
This will go largely unnoticed amidst the dramatic sprint finish, but the result marks the fifth time in 2024 that the 24-year-old Belgian has finished in the top ten of a first or second-division race.
While we always knew Van Gils was a talented climber, staying with the lead group up the ultra-high-speed Cipressa and Poggio means he has the requisite explosive ability to compete at nearly every major one-day Classic, perhaps excluding Paris-Roubaix, in the future.