Slovakia's Peter Sagan at the 2011 Tour of California. (Wil Matthews)
Illness, injury, and uncertain form create a wide-open la Primavera.
By Joe Lindsey
Saturday is the first of cycling’s five “Monuments,” or great one-day races: Milan-San Remo.
Known as la Primavera as it is the traditional start of big-time racing, M-SR is one of the most prestigious and sought-after palmares a rider can have on his resume.
It can confirm an ascendant career (in 1966, a precocious second-year pro named Eddy Merckx took the win and would go on to win six more times) or serve to confirm it—last year Australian Matt Goss was considered something of a surprise winner despite a number of race victories in his career. This year he’ll lead the GreenEdge team in hopes of a repeat.
It’s also a dinosaur of sorts. At just under 300 kilometers long, it’s a throwback to the days when the Tour de France regularly featured 300km stages and riders unapologetically took the train after dark only to start again the next day.
UCI rules limit length for even the mightiest one-day events to 260km. (This is the source of recent angst over the route of Paris-Roubaix, which sits at 257.5km for the 2012 edition but is battling a possible re-route around a fuel depot that has been declared a no-event zone by local authorities.) But Milan-San Remo gets an exception.
Historically, that has also meant that most riders with M-SR aspirations race the Tirreno-Adriatico stage race just before. T-A regularly includes a long M-SR-style prep stage. This year it was the massive Stage 4, an eight-hour, 251km odyssey won by Peter Sagan in a dramatic sprint atop a steep climb in Chieti.
It’s easy to look at Tirreno-Adriatico to handicap the field for Milan-San Remo. But to do so would overlook a few other dangerous characters who might play in the finale.
Here’s a look at a few of my favorites, dark horses, and an outside factor that might influence the race.
Favorites
Peter Sagan (Liquigas-Cannondale): Sagan is an easy pick here, as he was won the monster fourth stage of Tirreno-Adriatico. Sagan is a unique talent: He can climb, as he showed on the T-A stage to Chieti, where he duked it out with Danilo Di Luca and Roman Krueziger, among others. And he can sprint, as he’s shown many times. He’s got flying form right now. It’s too early to tell, but he could be poised for the kind of season Philippe Gilbert had last year.
The question is, how cohesive is his team right now after Tirreno? Despite two stage wins and the overall, there was tension between Sagan and teammate Vincenzo Nibali, who also has M-SR hopes. They form a one-two punch few teams can match, but it all depends on if they work with or against each other.
Heinrich Haussler (Garmin-Barracuda): Tyler Farrar is Garmin’s top sprinter but Haussler, who nearly won here in 2009, is my pick from this team. He’s sprinting fantastically right now, and he’s got both the ability to make it over the hills and the experience of what it takes for a top finish here. After a full, injury-free season in 2011, he’s looking like he might regain the form he had in 2009.
Matt Goss (GreenEdge): I include Gossy here because of his win last year. He’s got a strong team behind him with Stuart O’Grady to keep him out of trouble and Simon Gerrans in the pocket to patrol any attacks and limit GreenEdge’s responsibility to set the pace in the pack. But he bailed out of Tirreno with illness, and other than leading T-A after GreenEdge won the opening team time trial, his results have been slim this year.
Mark Cavendish (Sky): Cav also DNF’d at Tirreno, but not from illness; it was planned, and he won a stage there to confirm his form. Sky goes incredibly deep. They’ve got Edvald Boasson Hagen, Juan Antonio Flecha, Thomas Lovqvist and Bernie Eisel. Any of those guys on a good day could win this race. And as Cav showed at Tirreno when he was not having a good day and told the team to work for Boasson Hagen (who then won the stage), if he’s not feeling well, he’ll hand over the lead to someone who is.
Oscar Freire (Katusha): Of the favorites, Freire is arguably the most dangerous. He’s won this race three times. He’s got good form despite being one of the older racers in the pack; when Freire is good he can have a top gear that almost no one else can match. And he’s got a secret weapon of sorts in Katusha adviser Erik Zabel, a four-time winner of Milan-San Remo whose encyclopedic knowledge of the race is matched by no one. Some teams have a soigneur or bus driver scout the finish of races that are likely to end in sprints; Zabel walks the last 2km himself, checking everything from barrier position to wind. Ain’t no bus driver ever won Milan-San Remo.
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