Milan-Sanremo is often compared to a game of chess. On paper, the analogy makes sense: a 298 kilometre battle of patience, positioning, and perfectly timed moves, rewarding the rider who reads the race best.
Enthusiasts extol the anticipation. Critics loathe the six-hour wait.
But the media’s habitual reach for the mind-game cliché to describe Milan-Sanremo forces us into our own trap. We create narratives that are boring at worst, predictable at best. Today’s race, most of us concurred, would be a match between the GOAT Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu Van der Poel, perhaps one of the best classicists since Sean Kelly. A drawn-out duel between UAE Team Emirates XRG and Alpecin-Premier Tech would deliver their leaders to the foot of the Cipressa, where a brief, decisive moment might happen: an attack, either there or on the Poggio di San Remo. Then? Checkmate.
But today, if anything, proved why, in a race as long as La Classicissima, that metaphor is futile. Today was not chess. Six and a half hours of racing distilled into a half wheel between a battered and bruised world champion and Tom Pidcock – arguably a dark horse contender – is not mind games. Rather, it is chaos. Beautiful, unpredictable chaos.
Four-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar held off Tom Pidcock in the final two-man sprint (Image: Getty)
Two-time Milan-Sanremo champion and this year’s favourite, Van der Poel – who was shockingly dropped on the Poggio en route to an eighth-place finish – was outspoken in an interview with the press yesterday.
He said: “I think it’s a matter of time before [Pogačar] wins. He can win after a very hard race.”
While the Dutchman can be respected for his candidness, he probably wasn’t anticipating that his prediction would come to fruition 18 hours later.
Okay, so we have another Pogačar win. If this were a usual victory episode from the Slovenian (a long solo launch to shoo others off his wheel) the cynics might roll their eyes, yawn, switch over channels. But here we can draw again from Van der Poel’s prediction: it was a very, very hard race for Pog indeed.
A carnage crash in Imperia, 30 km from the finish at the foot of the often race-deciding Cipressa, forced him into an urgent chase. With the support of his UAE Team Emirates XRG teammates, he fought his way back into contention. On the Poggio, he launched an attack that only Pidcock and Van der Poel could follow.
(Image: Getty)
“When I crashed, I thought it was all over,” said Pogačar, whose ripped rainbow skin-suit jostling against Pidcock's navy Pinarello-Q36.5 colours was strangely reminisent of 2025 Strade Bianche scenes. “To crash in Imperia just before the most important part of the race is not ideal, but luckily I was quickly back on the bike.”
“Then I saw my team, Florian [Vermeersch] and Felix [Großschartner]; they left everything out there to come back to the front. They gave me back hope, and the legs were still okay. Brandon [McNulty] and Isaac [del Toro] did the rest on the Cipressa.”
The world champion concluded: “Ideally it would be to go alone, but Tom was really strong. In the end, me and Tom came together, and I was lucky in the sprint. Tom is a really fast guy – we all know this. I was a bit afraid when he let me go first. In the end, I was surprised. It was really close, and chapeau to him.”
First on the Via Roma means that Paris-Roubaix is all that stands between Pogačar and victory at all five monuments. All the while, Wout van Aert [Visma Lease a Bike] crashed, changed bike, chased back to the peloton, attacked in the final phase and almost caught the pair, coming back from over one minute behind to third place.
Milan–Sanremo doesn’t feature harsh cobbles or steep climbs. It often favours luck over endurance or pure strength. It’s long – very long. Some think it’s too long. But that distance is exactly why it matters: it refines everything into the mercurial showdown of the final section, giving us surprising and defining moments in our sport: like Pogačar’s win today.
