How Milan-San Remo Donne Was Won and/or Lost
Let's see how the ladies dealt with the Poggio
One thing I like about Milan-San Remo is the fact that it usually1 comes down to an up-and-down over one hill. That makes it a pretty easy tactical breakdown. For those of you who didn’t see the race and don’t mind having the ending spoiled, here’s a highlight clip:
What I’m going to do is what I did for the men’s race last year, and examine the final ascent and descent of the Poggio, and pinpoint when each of the contenders was no longer in the hunt for victory.2
The race actually started to come apart on the Cipressa, where there were a couple splits in the peloton. A group of 12, including most of the favorites, got a gap, then were quickly caught by the peloton when their cohesion collapsed. I say “peloton” but only about 35 riders—albeit representing 17 teams—came to the Poggio together. That’s where we pick things up.
My biggest question going in was whether the Poggio would play the same for the women as it usually does the men. And it didn’t really. Not because it was steep enough to be selective; on the contrary, the pace wasn’t particularly fast.
That’s Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig on the front, Miss Freeloader herself the way some people talk about her. But she’s not in this race to win; she’s in it for Kasia Niewiadoma and/or Chloe Dygert. And in order for one of them to win, the pace in this race has to be such that the sprinters get dropped, especially Lorena Wiebes of SD Worx, who’s not visible in this picture but you’ll see her distinctive European championship jersey soon enough.
The front group is juuuust starting to stretch out here.
Uttrup Luwdig stays on the front basically two-thirds of the way up the Poggio, and the pace doesn’t get high enough to start dropping riders until they’re within the last kilometer before the summit. The group of 30-odd riders strings out a little, mostly around the various hairpins, but nobody gets dropped. As the TV camera switches back and forth from a head-on motorbike view to the overhead helicopter view, you keep seeing the back of rider No. 124, Ane Santesteban, bringing up the rear. But she never gets dropped. Nor do Cat Ferguson and Yara Kastelijn, who also spent most of the climb dangling off the rails of the caboose.
At one kilometer from the summit, we get our first challenge to Uttrup Ludwig’s pacing.
First rider on the road is Uttrup Ludwig, followed by Niewiadoma. Juliette Labous of FDJ is coming up on the right. Labous, Demi Vollering’s last remaining teammate at this point, isn’t taking Vollering with her. But Canyon-SRAM’s pacing was simply not cutting it for Vollering. She needed a gap on the uphill section of the Poggio, or else she’d be vulnerable to better descenders, time trialists, and sprinters.
Two riders behind Labous here, you’ll see a pink jersey followed by a red jersey with a pink helmet. Those are EF Education-Oatly riders: Magdeleine Vallieres and Noemi Rüegg. Two of their teammates—I believe that’s Letizia Borghesi and Cédrine Kerbaol at the bottom of the screen and over on the left, respectively—made it this far in the lead group, but Kristen Faulkner didn’t. It was her first race of the year, and she got dropped on the Cipressa. Pity, because the finale of this race was a good fit for her.
What Uttrup Ludwig failed to do with a steady effort, Labous did with a sudden attack. Niewiadoma snapped right onto her wheel, then went straight over the top, but she didn’t make much headway.
The counterattack that paid off came from a rider in a white jersey with rainbow bands, but not Lotte Kopecky. Kim Le Court of AG Insurance-Soudal is the Mauritian national champion, and at a glance her jersey is indistinguishable from the world champ’s.
This isn’t the whole surviving group, but it’s so strung out now it won’t fit in one helicopter shot. Rüegg is the rider in red, in fourth place. Kopecky is all the way down, fourth rider from the bottom of the screen. And notice the last rider you can see, in the pink boots? That’s Dygert, who’s hung on all the way to the top of the climb.
A half kilometer left, Vollering finally made her move, such as it was, and took the summit of the Poggio first. But by this point, she’s done for. The group’s been thinned down from 30 to 40 riders to 15, but Vollering doesn’t have the engine or the sprint to bully this big a group on level terrain. Nor does Niewiadoma. Both of them are, for all intents and purposes, done at this point.
At this point, the camera angle switched to an overhead drone shot, which was absolutely fucking sick. We saw some of this last year, especially in cyclocross, and I loved it. You really get a sense of the speed these riders are going downhill on a narrow road lined with jagged rocks.
This is where Dygert starts to dangle off the back. She’s never been a great bikehandler, and given that she suffered career-altering (and very nearly career-ending) injuries in a crash at the 2020 World Time Trial Championship, I don’t blame her one bit for playing it safe here.
But with better positioning within this group, Dygert could’ve launched an attack on the flat. You know how I said Vollering doesn’t have the power to make a Kristen Faulkner-type raid stick? Dygert does. She was able to get back into the mix by the finish line thanks to a combination of her own power and the lead group fucking around, but this is about where she lost the opportunity to win.
Seconds after Dygert lost touch, Puck Pieterse came around Vollering and to the head of the group, and started pegging it. When a line of riders like this goes around corners, it stretches out. The lead rider is braking and cornering at their own pace, while everyone behind has to hesitate, to a greater or lesser extent, for the rider in front.
So you can see Pieterse, on every hairpin, pull a few meters on Vollering, who pulls a few meters on Elisa Longo Borghini, who pulls a few meters on Wiebes, and so on. The gap always gets closed, but it takes time and energy.
With around four kilometers left, right at the foot of the climb, the group starts to tear apart. Vollering and Pieterse are able to pull out a gap that for a second I thought they might be able to make stick. Behind, Ferguson and Margot Vanpachtenbeke3 have to unclip or risk crashing, and the group loses yet another few members.
But the front group of about 12, from Pieterse to Rüegg, manages to stay in touch. By the end of the descent, Wiebes is stopping for a drink even as Vollering and Pieterse are nominally controlling the pace. The speed has gone out of the race.
At this point, Vollering, Pieterse, and the other favorites start to let up and take stock of the situation. They want to know who survived the descent, and who they have to mark between here and the Via Roma.
And while they’re doing that, Longo Borghini says, “Fuck this shit, I’m out.” Within a couple hundred meters, this is what the front of the race looks like.
It’s the Faulkner Maneuver, and it works because for every second it takes for the other riders to realize what’s going on, she’s putting two or three bike lengths on them. Every second they look at each other and play chicken—“I’m not chasing her. You chase her!”—it’s another few lengths.
Watching this live, I was convinced that 1) Longo Borghini was going to make it stick and 2) the Vollering-Pieterse group spent about half an hour fucking around before they figured out who was going to go on the front and chase. Pieterse stays on the front for ages and is either unwilling or unable to move. They dither so long the second group on the road—the remnants of the group that split at the bottom of the Poggio—catches up.
At which point Lotte Kopecky decides to take one for the team.
I was so flabbergasted at the second group’s inaction that I got my stopwatch out while I was writing this; 45 seconds elapsed from Longo Borghini’s attack to Kopecky taking over at the front of the chase group. My screenshot only shows Kopecky, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Rüegg, and a little bit of Le Court’s sleeve.4 But the gang’s all here. Vollering, Labous, Elisa Balsamo, the works.
Kopecky knows she’d have a chance against anyone in a sprint if she plays her cards right. But doing so would make it more likely that Longo Borghini escapes up the road and Kopecky’s ultimate sprint would be for second. Besides, her teammate, Wiebes, is the fastest woman on two wheels, and she’s right there. Not only did Wiebes make it over the Cipressa and the Poggio, she did it with all the tension and drama of someone reading a magazine at a bus stop.
As much as Kopecky’s got her own ambitions, she knows that if she pulls, Wiebes would be a heavy favorite to win. I did have it pointed out to me that a world champion sacrificing their own race to set up a sprinter is how the men’s race ended last year. It’s similar, as Mathieu van der Poel set up Jasper Philipsen perfectly, but not the same. Inaction by Kopecky would’ve all but guaranteed a Longo Borghini win.
But once Kopecky got on the front, that gap came down rapidly. She was riding so hard she actually caused a split in her own chase group, as Le Court lost Wiebes’ wheel with about 700 meters to go. By the 300-meter mark it was clear that Longo Borghini was done for, and for my last screenshot I’ll share the first moments of the final sprint.
Longo Borghini’s on the far left. Next to her is Kopecky, who pulls up, having completed her task. Vos, the rider in yellow on the right side of the screen, was first to move.
Everyone followed her out of Kopecky’s slipstream to the left-hand side5 of the road. And this is where the race is basically done for. Pieterse is in the all-white helmet. She’s boxed in behind Vollering. There are two, maybe three riders with the ability and motivation to maybe, maybe, challenge Wiebes in a sprint:
Dygert (pink boots, far right): Too far back at the start of the sprint, plus she’s had to spend a ton of energy closing a gap that Wiebes opened for free, thanks to gravity
Balsamo (red helmet, red shoulders, blue sleeves, third from left): Boxed in behind Ferrand-Prévot, the yellow rider on the left. Ferrand-Prévot is seen here sliding over into Rüegg, which is massively dangerous in a sprint like this and therefore an equally massive no-no. That got Ferrand-Prévot relegated from fourth, where she finished on the road, to 12th.
And then there’s Vos
But Wiebes, in the white and black helmet and white jersey, had a clear run to the line with about 100 meters left. And at that point, she’s going to win about 95 percent of the time. Rüegg actually made a nifty little move to catch Wiebes’ draft and get towed to the line in third place, but Wiebes was an overwhelming favorite 1) when she got to the bottom of the Poggio in one piece and 2) when Kopecky got on the front to catch Longo Borghini.
When she opened up her sprint cleanly, it was all over.
Hope you enjoyed this; catch you tomorrow with a similar breakdown of the men’s Milan-San Remo.
But not always, apparently, thank you Tadej
I’ll get to the fellas’ race tomorrow; congratulations, we’ve returned to the era of two-posts-a-week blogging.
Dutch names!
“Oh, rainbow bands on the cuffs, that must be a former world champion,” I thought to myself. “But Ferrand-Prévot and Marianne Vos wouldn’t be wearing white sleeves, and I don’t think any other former world road race champs made it into…oh it’s Le Court again.”
Stage left, from their perspective
Ferguson crashing on the descent was so tough after she kept contact on the Poggio. Seeing her in the final sprint would've been sick (but not as sick as the drones!)
Great blow by blow breakdown!