The Wheelhouse
I know the newsletter has been going to spam for almost everyone, including me, since I moved off Substack. I think — I think — I fixed it. Fingers crossed. If this is the first edition of Wheelysports you’ve gotten in a minute, you can go back and read my world championship coverage on Medium.
Il Lombardia is tomorrow. Tadej Pogačar is going to win. Unless he crashes. Actually, you know what? After what we saw at Strade Bianche, we know Pog can win even if he crashes. He’s going to win unless he crashes and he maims himself, which nobody wants. So he’s going to win.
Ordinarily, I like Il Lombardia. One of the great appeals of cycling is that its doesn’t revolve around a single event, so you’ve got different riders peaking for different races from March to October. Nevertheless, by this point in the calendar most everyone’s running on fumes. Half the big names have packed it in for the season, or are feuding with their employers in advance of an offseason move.
During the pandemic, I played a ton, and I mean an absolute buttload, of Pro Cycling Manager. Over various create-a-player careers, I usually played as either a GC rider/time trialist or puncheur, because what’s the point if you can’t ride for the grand tours?
Anyway, my two favorite one-day races to race in that game were Il Lombardia and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, partly because each race is preceded by a week of undercard events. For Liège–Bastogne–Liège, it’s the fabled Ardennes Week, with the Amstel Gold Race and La Flèche Wallonne.(1) Il Lombardia’s tuneup races — Giro dell’Emilia, Tre Valli Varesine and Gran Piemonte — aren’t World Tour-level, but their position on the map and the calendar usually brings in enough big names that the distinction is only academic.
What can we learn from those warmup races? Pogačar won Tre Valli Varesine with an attack on the penultimate climb. He didn’t race the other two; his teammate, Isaac del Toro won those: Gran Piemonte with an attack on the final climb and a solo effort to win, Giro dell’Emilia from a group of two with Tom Pidcock.
Pogačar also won the European road race championship, which is comforting. Three of the four winners of the senior world championships were from Europe: Pogačar, men’s ITT winner Remco Evenepoel, and women’s ITT winner Marlen Reusser. I thought it was a bit odd to have the European championships a week after Worlds, because, well, Europe is part of the World, so the World champions present at the European championships ought to win there too.
They did; in fact, the men’s race had the same 1–2 (Pogačar and Evenepoel). The only world champion who didn’t complete the European double was Magdeleine Vallieres, who is ineligible to compete by virtue of being Canadian.(2)
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The thing that makes Pogačar the greatest of all time is his versatility. He can handle cobbles and mountains, punchy climbs, time trials, even a little sprinting. It’s a staggering rebuke to a sport that’s become more and more specialized over the preceding 50 years.
But because Pogačar wins everywhere, it’s easy to forget that he has a wheelhouse.
This is it.
Il Lombardia is unique among big one-day races in that it’s a legitimate climbers’ classic. This year’s edition actually loses 40 meters’ elevation in its 241 kilometers of running, but there are seven marked climbs, including three that peak over 1,000 meters. The Zambla Alta is actually more than 1,000 meters higher than the start and finish lines. This is where Pogačar eats, and in a one-day race that rewards a faster pace and stronger solo riders than grand tour mountain stages, he eats everyone up.
Pogačar has won this race every time he’s entered it. If he wins this weekend, he’ll tie Fausto Coppi for the most career wins of Il Lombardia. Only Coppi and Eddy Merckx have won a single monument five times. Only Coppi and Pogačar have won a single monument even four years in a row. Nobody’s won the same monument five straight years.
Looking at the monuments, Milan-San Remo is too flat for Pogačar to win by brute force, and Paris-Roubaix is too cobbled. (At least for now.) If you look at the other three Monuments (Il Lombardia, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Tour of Flanders), Pogačar has won his past seven starts. At his two best races (Il Lombardia and Liège–Bastogne–Liège), he’s won every time he finished.
Since April 2021, Pogačar is 10-for-11 at Strade Bianche, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Il Lombardia. The only exception was Liège–Bastogne–Liège 2023, when he fell and broke his wrist.
If Pogačar wins on Saturday, he’ll also become the first rider other than Merckx to win three monuments in a single season.
This being the last race of the season worth mentioning, another resounding Pogačar win would raise a troubling quesiton: Is he just getting more dominant?
(1) Or, Extended Ardennes Week, with Brabantse Pijl included
(2) Vallieres is from Quebec, and speaking as an American who grew up thinking Quebec is basically Europe, maybe she could’ve gotten a waiver.
