I Love Strade Bianche the Correct Amount

Analyzing the great hipster lightning rod of the classics season

Photo Credit: Adrian Betteridge, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

An old journalism professor called it a “shibboleth.” That word went out of style when people turned on Aaron Sorkin and The West Wing. Nowadays we call it “gatekeeping.”

It’s the complex and multifaceted process of identifying in-groups and out-groups within a social circle. Who belongs and who doesn’t? You have to know the basics, the jargon, the conventional wisdom. Then you have to learn what the cool iconoclastic opinions are. But be careful, because if you toe the cool iconoclastic party line too assiduously, you’ll be outed as an even worse kind of poseur.

Having spent my entire life trying to convince people I’m the smartest person in the room, I know the subtleties of this dance intimately, in many intellectual arenas. In my entire career, one of the works of cultural criticism I’m most proud of is an essay about how hating Coldplay has become such an easy and rote opinion to hold that it’s now a powerful signifier of the incuriosity from which its adherents so desperately want to distance themselves. Leave a comment if you think hating Coldplay makes you cool.

“Who cares?” I can hear you asking. “Why now, why Coldplay in this erstwhile cycling newsletter?”

Because tomorrow is Strade Bianche.

Strade Bianche is my favorite one-day race on the calendar, which—depending on who you ask—makes me either an insufferable hipster or the most basic bitch on a planet of basic bitches. Perhaps both.

With its rolling hills, gravel sectors, and demanding technical finale, it’s a challenge unlike any other on the World Tour. In good weather, it has the most beautiful backdrop in sports. In bad, it’s a brutal muddy slog on par with the miseries of Paris-Roubaix or World War I. It attracts the best riders in the world, from a variety of specializations, and conjures some of their best work.

The past eight winners are some of the biggest names in the sport:

• 2023: Tom Pidcock

• 2022: Tadej Pogačar

• 2021: Mathieu van der Poel

• 2020: Wout van Aert

• 2019: Julian Alaphilippe

• 2018: Tiesj Benoot

• 2017: Michał Kwiatkowski

• 2016: Fabian Cancellara

The women’s race has been run nine times and won by eight different riders, all of them world championship medalists, five of them rainbow jersey winners.

But while it takes a special quality of rider to win Strade Bianche, this is the only race on the calendar in which almost any style of rider could triumph. There are puncheurs and cobblemasters, but Strade has also been podiumed by Roman Bardet and Egan Bernal, two of the waifiest pure climbers in the men’s peloton. It’s anyone’s game.

Small wonder that this race has become a fan favorite. Eddie Izzard has a bit about Europe being “where the history is from.” This is true in cycling, whose most prestigious races trace their origins back more than 100 years. Liège–Bastogne–Liège predates the airplane, and its first edition was closer in history to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire than to the first Strade Bianche in 2007.

Nevertheless, this triviality, which was invented after the iPhone, has fanatical adherents. “Strade Bianche should be a monument!” became a popular cause in cycling circles a couple years ago. Enough so that a backlash has had time to coalesce. The latter is now the opinion of the in-group in cycling.

And the traditionalists are probably right. A grand tour is a race format: A three-week stage race. If there came to be a three-week stage race in some other polity with mountains and a strong cycling culture—like Germany, or Colombia, or California—it would to some extent be futile to deny it grand tour status, even if it never ascended to the prestige of the current trio.

But there’s nothing in terms of format or scheduling that separates a monument from a classic. Nor is there some formal organizing body—no Monuments Men, as it were—with the authority to declare that a race is or is not a monument.

There is only tradition. Age. Even if the “Strade Bianche should be a monument!” crowd did win primacy over public opinion, it wouldn’t matter, because there’d be no mechanism by which it could become a monument.

And it doesn’t really matter. The reason the push for monument status got popular enough to mock is that this race is awesome.

I’m generally not a fan of Italy—speaking of shibboleths, the Neapolitan pizza fascists alone should earn that country no end of derision—but between Strade, and the finale of Milan-San Remo, and the Giro, and the Monza F1 track, it’s the best country in the world for going fast on wheels.

To watch Strade Bianche is to sit among the gorgeous Tuscan hillsides—you know how when Maximus is dying at the end of Gladiator he imagines walking up to his farmhouse while running his hand through the growing wheat? That’s where this race is. Well, I guess canonically that’s in Spain, but it was filmed where they race Strade Bianche. And I mean that literally—they shot that part of Gladiator south of Siena, where Strade starts and ends. The “Are you not entertained?” guy thinks this is what heaven looks like, and that’s good enough for me.¹

This lovely terrain produces incredible racing, because it’s littered with short, sharp hills and 15 gravel sections for the men, 12 for the women. Almost every inch of the second half of the race is either cobblestones, gravel, or on an incline. Which means opportunities to attack are everywhere, and fortune favors the bold.

Nobody in the peloton is bolder than van der Poel, who spun the world backwards to launch a peloton-destroying attack on the gravel in 2021.

The finale is mostly uphill and technical, through the winding streets of Siena. The sharp right-hand turn at the crest of the final climb makes this the rare race where a sprint finish is almost impossible; whoever comes around the final corner first usually wins at the line.

Gravel is having a moment as a racing surface, as grassroots gravel racing—as sort of a median between cross-country mountain biking and road racing—is becoming more popular and professionalized.²

If anything, gravel is even more of a chaos element than cobblestones. Flat tires are part of the game on this course, and anyone suffering a mechanical might sit there and wait for a while because the team cars have trouble passing a spread-out field on narrow roads.

But the gravel isn’t bad enough to weed out all the little guys. And the climbing, while demanding, isn’t hard enough to weed out all the big guys. So this is an almost unique situation: A parcours that isn’t really ideal for anyone, but is passable for almost any world-class rider.

Van der Poel isn’t on the startlist this time around, nor is van Aert. But Alaphilippe is, fresh off a nasty spill at Omloop. So is Pogačar, in his first action of the year, along with defending champion Pidcock.

Ordinarily I’d pick Pogačar to win, but this is his first race day of the year—Pog is taking the start of the season slow so as not to burn himself out before his attempt at the Giro-Tour double. With no van der Poel or van Aert, Pidcock becomes second-favorite.

After that, it opens up a bit and it kind of depends on how the race shakes out. EF has never won this race, but the boys in pink are bringing four riders—Richard Carapaz, Alberto Bettiol, Ben Healy, and Neilson Powless—who could end up in the top 10 in the right conditions. The newly rebranded Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale has been on fire so far this season, and the steep climbs in the second half of the race suit Benoît Cosnefroy.

With most of the rest of Visma-LAB’s classics team on the bench, Christophe Laporte should have undisputed team leadership and Sepp Kuss by his side. And in the absence of van der Poel, I rate Matej Mohorič as the most likely classics rider to try to pull off something nuts.

Young American Quinn Simmons always goes all-out at this race, and he excels in tricky conditions. Michael Gogl has basically been a domestique his entire career, but for reasons nobody really understands he turns into Eddy Merckx at Strade Bianche. He finished in the top 10 back-to-back years in 2020 and 2021, and outside the Austrian national championships, Gogl has two other top 10s, total, since 2019. A faster pace on the gravel could suit Kasper Asgreen; a slower one could suit the young Lenny Martinez.

But most exciting: UAE Team Emirates is bringing Our Man Isaac del Toro.

On the women’s side, SD Worx is bringing the two most recent champions—Lotte Kopecky and Demi Vollering—who came down to the final corner together in 2022. Kasia Niewiadoma is also on the start list, as is Marianne Vos, who hung with Kopecky at Omloop and outsprinted her to the line.

But the one rider I want to highlight is 21-year-old Dutch rider Puck Pieterse.

The dominant story of the past five years in men’s road cycling has been the cyclocross invasion: van der Poel, van Aert, and Pidcock going from the dirt to the tarmac and using their combination of explosivity and bike-handling skills to run their competitors in the classics ragged.

Alpecin-Deceuninck basically got started as a road team in order to bring van der Poel to the classics and the Tour de France. And the sister team, Fenix-Deceuninck, is testing out a series of Dutch cyclocrossers as well. It hasn’t happened, at least not yet, for former European champion Yara Kastelijn or former world champion Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado.

But Pieterse might be the real deal. In the past two cyclocross seasons, she’s started 35 races and finished off the podium once. She’s in the red, white and blue horizontal stripes in this video. Watch her slide down that sand dune and tell me she’ll have trouble with the gravel.

Anyway, Pieterse has ridden four senior pro road races in her life. Two of them were last weekend, and she finished eighth at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and 10th at Omloop van het Hageland.³

One of her other two road race starts was last year’s Strade Bianche. She finished fifth.

Even if official monument status remains a contentious impossibility, Strade Bianche represents the future of professional cycling: Demanding, all-action, attack-friendly. And—crucially for a sport that can get predictable when top riders are at their best—completely chaotic.

It’s the perfect way to announce that the business end of the cycling season is on its way. You’ll know it’s coming by the cloud of dust.

1. Around this point while I was writing on Thursday night, my group chat blew up because a friend of mine joked about auditioning for Love is Blind. So we all stopped what we were doing for an hour and browbeat her into doing it, because she’s wonderful and she’d be great on TV. This devolved into someone comparing my wife, favorably, to Vinny from Jersey Shore, and because it’s getting late and I want to have something to show for my effort, here are the men’s Strade Bianche contenders as cast members of Jersey Shore:

• Snooki: Sergio Higuita

• JWoww: Tadej Pogačar

• The Situation: Tom Pidcock

• Sammi Sweetheart: Quinn Simmons

• Pauly D: Matej Mohorič

• Ronnie: Alberto Bettiol

• Deena: Michael Gogl

• Vinny: Magnus Cort

• Angelina: Julian Alaphilippe
  

2. And talk about shibboleths and posturing hipsters. Jeeeeezus. When I first promoted this newsletter on Twitter someone joked that I hadn’t written anything about “The Spirit of Gravel.” I’d rather shoot myself.

3. More Omloops than you can shake a stick at.