OPINION | Tadej Pogacar would have already won the Milano-Sanremo if he were not Tadej Pogacar
Cycling
The hangover of a totally historic Milano-Sanremo 2025 has not yet left. Mathieu van der Poel, Tadej Pogacar and Filippo Ganna left a fight for the most memorable pages of cycling from Cipressa to the finish line via the Poggio.
UAE had the perfect plan for Pogacar to win for the first time a monument that continues to elude him, and where he has been 3rd in the last two editions. It's probably the race that makes him seem most human.
The problem for the World Champion was that his rivals had too much control over him. His attack in Cipressa was very clear, and neither Alpecin-Deceuninck nor INEOS Grenadiers allowed him to go solo with their respective leaders.
On the Poggio, Van der Poel didn't let Pogacar go a single meter in any of the five attacks the Slovenian tried. The control his rivals have over him in this race is too high. They know it's a classic that the UAE star is obsessed with. For that reason, Tadej Pogacar would have already won Milano-Sanremo if he wasn't Tadej Pogacar.
What does this mean? In recent years, Pogacar has never been let go because we know perfectly well who he is and how he rides. If, on the other hand, he had been a more powerful climber, a contender almost exclusively for grand tours, but with the ability to be a classics specialist, he would certainly have been much less watched than he is, and he could have escaped in Cipressa, but especially on the Poggio.
Riders like Mathieu van der Poel know that if they give Pogacar more than 2 meters, the Slovenian will go solo. To give an example of the above, the Tour de France 2020 comes to mind perfectly. Pogacar was part of the lineup for the Grande Boucle, initially to be a co-leader with Fabio Aru. In the second week he surprised the favorites by winning two mountain stages that put him within a minute of Primoz Roglic.
The time trial at La Planche des Belles Filles was cycling history. Pogacar, still far from the spotlight he currently holds, took the overall lead and ended up becoming the second youngest rider of all time to win the Tour de France.
There he was not yet a big star, and he benefited from this to win his first Tour title. If the times he raced Milano-Sanremo to win had been done without his current status, Pogacar would have already won this "cursed" monument for him.
The final conclusion is that there is nothing to reproach Tadej Pogacar for in Milano-Sanremo. The Slovenian puts in the performance needed to win, but because of the lack of hardness on the climbs, his rivals have a much easier time preventing him from escaping. And, in the end, the sprint always ends up with a specialist faster than the UAE Team Emirates XRG star.
Original: Jorge Borreguero
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Barney26-03-2025 - Everyone was so keen on free speech for a while, what happened ;-) But seriously, the problem is not so much that he gave his view as that someone follows it and spreads it, not totally unlike the schoolkids running US war games at present ;-)Mistermaumau26-03-2025
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