George Foreman dies and we remember Kinsasa and Muhammad Ali, transmuted into a cyclist 50 years later, in the shadow of the pines its leaves stirred by wind in favor, fresh, from the north, 15 kilometers per hour, the wind of the speed that pushes towards San Remo through the Vía Aurelia, and the Final Rome route. Everyone awaits him, but only Mathieu van der Poel and Filippo Ganna resist.
. All the mysterious, indecipherable fabric, which makes the San Remo the simplest and most complicated monument to understand, wants to destroy it with pure pogacar force, which faces the impossible. Destroza the race. A three game and the forgotten platoon. It does not seek to unravel the codes of the classicissima, it does not try to discourage them number by number until the door opens. Brutally prefers to burn everything, and sigh. Ganna, the gigantic Piedmontés of the great beard and legs like pylons that Machacan if piety, suffers but does not lose, always has 50, 60 meters, at 10, eight, to eight, nothing. And van der Poel, to his wheel, aspirated by his rebuild, pedalless without opening his mouth. Meditating. Calculated. Playing. Foreman laughing at Ali. Hunting him with an unexpected against. An irony, historical justice, which culminates in the sprint on Rome. The intelligence against the force already empty of Pogacar, against Ganna’s desire. Who resists wins. The victory. A work of art of great cycling.
Last straight. The last two world champions, in the rain the two, in Glasgow the grandson of Poulidor, in Zurich the Slovenian, the two best of the decade in the territory of the monuments, finally raise their foot. They have to admit Ganna in the Sprint. Pogacar stops out of necessity. He has hit so much that his legs can no longer. They need air. He is already dead. The Dutch, great teacher of the monuments, and in his head all the possibilities and his legs are executed, acts with a unique tactical sense.Ganna does not worry him. Free the march. Everyone stops. They look. They are expected. Van der Poel acts. As soon as the 300 meter signal passes, its legs are dynamite that transform into pure speed at less than a second. Open a hole of three, four meters, with Ganna and with Pogacar, further back. The comeback is impossible. Two years after his first San Remo, Van der Poel, 30, wins the second, the seventh monument of a unique race – three Flanders and two Roubaix too – seven like his seven titles of world champion of Ciclocross.
Before Victoria repeated the Alpecin corridor, the San Remo had counted 17 different victors for the last 17 years. Anyone can win, sprinters, pucanlucky men. And the best can lose it, they usually lose it, as Pogacar knows, winner of everything, of Flanders, Liege, Lombardy, Tour, Giro, of the World Cup, of any stage of any race, and a loser in the race that comes out of the fog and the cold rain of the Padana plain, and the melancholic accordion sounds that surrounds them until the turchino, the tunnel that begins black Mediterranean light and the smell of pampering on the coast. The race that does not know what to do to win it, in which the brutal, distant and restless attack is not worth the vertical wall, which wins what he loses. The San Remo is long, flat, three mountains, six hours of yawns to wheel, 22 minutes of unique action.
Premonitory, bleak that wants to seem ironic, and Pogacar can have sad thoughts that contradict the smile, remains that it shows in when it is pedaling with the bicycle with the handlebar in v, Light, the shell in ythe Slovenian trusted a friend a few months ago: “I want to win the five monuments, and I am missing Paris-Roubaix and San Remo. San Remo is the one that will send me to the grave, I have the feeling. I probably, I will die in the attempt. I am approaching a lot [en cinco participaciones en la Classicissima, que Merckx ganó siete veces, ha quedado dos veces tercero, cuarto, quinto y 12º]but I’m still far away, it’s amazing. But to make it clear, it is a goal. ”
118 years after the first Milan-San Remo was played, and shortly before the monsters, ogros and mortals occupied the Rome route at 70 per hour, the women had played the first Milan-San remote female in history, 156 kilometers from Genoa on the Ligur coast. The victory was played by a fortnight of runners who had made the difference in the climb and the descent of the Poggio. The least fast of all, the Italian champion Paola Longo Borghini attacked two kilometers from the finish line and passed under the red flame of the last kilometer with 3s advantage. The first did not arrive. It was reached by the group, which played a reduced sprint in which the European champion, the Dutch Lorena Wiebes, was imposed in front of her compatriot Marianne Vos and the Switzerland Noemí Rügg. Mavi García, 28th, 55s, was the first Spanish.
