I Thought This Was Supposed to Be the Race to the Sun
On the state of my patriotic mucus, after Matteo Jorgenson's successful Paris-Nice title defense
Yeah, like the headline says, Paris-Nice is called the Race to the Sun, because it starts in Paris and ends, well, you know. It’s a week of riding from blustery northern France to the gorgeous, temperate Riviera. Except last week it was cold and rained like hell all week. I was watching Peacock’s coverage of Stage 7 on Saturday and at one point Christian Vande Velde and Bob Roll were talking about riders abandoning the race. One of them, I think it was Vande Velde, said something along the lines of “I get it. This looks like it sucks.”
You know what doesn’t suck? Matteo Jorgenson, who was a bit of a surprise winner last year, defended his GC title. Last year, when Jorgenson won Paris-Nice and finished second at the Critérium du Dauphiné, I was like, “How ‘bout it? Can the big guy win a grand tour?”
Jorgenson’s GC win was impressive, and all things considered I think I’m even higher on him now than I was this time last year, but mostly he was just in the right place at the right time in a super weird race.
Jonas Vingegaard, Visma-Lease a Bike’s leader, crashed and abandoned after Stage 5 after leading the race, which vaulted Jorgenson in to the yellow jersey. Jorgenson also benefited from two Visma-LAB team efforts. The first: a win in the Stage 3 Team Time Trial, which put 24 seconds into his1 closest GC competition. Then on Stage 6, Visma-Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers sped off the front of the peloton on a windy descent, and when the chase never cohered, the two teams did some serious damage.
Both squads’ big pacemakers (Edoardo Affini, Victor Campanaerts, and Josh Tarling) made the split, and even their GC guys (Jorgenson, Magnus Sheffield, Tobias Foss) were powerful classics and/or time trial specialists as well. After jettisoning some of the Visma-Lease a Bike domestiques, a group of 12 riders came to the line together almost two minutes ahead of the nearest remnants of the peloton.
Jorgenson ended the day in yellow, 40 seconds up on second-place Florian Lipowitz, which put paid to any further doubt in the GC battle as long as Jorgenson stayed right-side up. Which he did, and when Mattias Skjelmose and Brandon McNulty abandoned from top-10 positions, he just ran up the score.
Which brings up another point; this was not an incredibly strong field. Jorgenson won last year not by attacking Remco Evenepoel, but by clinging to his wheel. Which was impressive enough in its own way, but there was no Remco in this race, nor either of the Slovenian grand tour monsters or the Yates twins. Juan Ayuso was off winning Tirreno-Adriatico. Jorgenson beat a strong field, but not an elite one.
Not that he’ll care. Not that I cared on Stage 8, when Sheffield broke away from Mads Pederson2 to take a solo win that had me pumping my fist. And, incidentally, to move up two spots to fourth on GC. If Ineos hadn’t upped the pace in the peloton late to protect Thymen Arensman, Sheffield might’ve ended up on the podium.
Ordinarily, a day like that would’ve had me reaching for my favorite Futurama screencap.
American GC win, American stage win…it doesn’t get much better than that. Suffice it to say I’m not feeling that much patriotic mucus at the moment. I doubt many of my American readers are. My stance on such matters, basically since Iraq War, has been that while sports are tied into national identity, national identity is not and should not be surrendered to whoever is in the White House at a given moment in time. I’ve said it over and over: This is the only country, the only community, the only culture, that I have. I own it as much as anyone does, and I won’t surrender it because someone I didn’t vote for is doing things I object to.
That’s a harder argument to make now. We’re watching that community and culture being dismantled like a local newspaper that’s just been bought by private equity. The law is void if not enforced, and because of the apathy and moral cowardice of those tasked with preserving the constitutional order, it’s not being enforced. Our government is not only committing humanitarian atrocities and cultural vandalism, it’s crowing about it. Our neighbors and friends are saying we’re no longer a safe place to travel. How could anyone feel pride in a moment like this?
“I’m gonna bribe the officials / I’m gonna kill all the judges / It’s gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage,” wrote the great American poet, who did not expect to see that line carried out literally. It’s not that this damage can’t be repaired, it’s that doing so will require a commitment to the idea of civilization and government as a positive good rather than a hindrance to maximum profit. That commitment has not existed in this country in my lifetime, and in fact, our civic religion has pushed us further and further from that ideal every day that I can remember.
Anyway, it’s a bike race. Isaac del Toro won Milano-Torino this week, a massive win for a 21-year-old and at least his biggest since he won a stage of the Tour Down Under last year. Maybe I’ll shift from patriotism to continental solidarity. ¡Viva México!
I’m not going to do a huge Milan-San Remo preview, because I just spent all that time talking about Jorgenson and venting my anxiety. And also because this is Positional Power Rankings week at FanGraphs. What does that mean? It means I’ve written north of 15,000 words about every second baseman and designated hitter in the league and spent far, far too much time contemplating Cubs utilityman Vidal Bruján. My brain is begging me to put the keyboard down. I’m sorry, I, uh, don’t have the legs.
In brief, Milan-San Remo is several hours of pointless toodling across the Italian countryside, culminating in a not-that-long sprint up a not-that-big hill, and a suicidally fast dash down tiny roads on the other side of said hill to a finish line on a wide urban boulevard. It’s hours of the most tedious racing of the year followed by about 10 to 15 minutes of the most exciting racing of the year.
The women are racing Milan-San Remo for the first time,3 albeit on a parcours about half the length of the men’s, and without the race’s only substantial climb, the Passo del Turchino.
Ordinarily, I get a little tetchy when the women get a shorter and easier parcours than the men. OK, I can understand shortening it a little so that the men and women complete their races in around the same time. But lopping off half of the race just feels patronizing.
Not in this case. Cutting 150 kilometers off the front of Milan-San Remo doesn’t say, “We don’t think you can do it.” It says, “We’re not going to waste any more of your time than we have to.”
Who’s going to win? To be honest, probably Tadej Pogačar or Mathieu van der Poel. They win everything. But last year, they kind of canceled each other out, and Japer Philipsen won a reduced bunch sprint.4 That could happen again, either to the benefit of Philipsen or Biniam Girmay, or one of Lidl-Trek’s duo of Pedersen and Jonathan Milan.
In 2022, Matej Mohorič won this race with one of the most incredible descending/bikehandling displays you’ll ever see. If he can do that, so can Tom Pidcock, who raced Pogačar hard at Strade Bianche.
The peloton is full of hybrid sprinters and puncheurs who could ordinarily catch the field sleeping, but the only climb that matters is the Poggio, and it’s all about getting into position and going like hell. The tactics still matter, but they’re played out at such an extreme high speed it limits who can get involved.
I don’t know that the Women’s World Tour peloton has done something quite like this before, but near as I can tell it’s got Lotte Kopecky’s name written all over it. If the Poggio plays more like a standard puncheur’s hill, that advantages Demi Vollering, Puck Pieterse and Kasia Niewiadoma. If it’s more of a mad scramble up and down, like how the men race it, that’s good news for Kopecky and Marianne Vos.
Van der Poel’s history of success here suggests that this could be a race that lends itself to a massive, torquey four-minute max-effort solo break. That’d be good news for both of the big Americans in this race, Chloe Dygert and Kristin Faulkner. And don’t forget about Movistar’s 18-year-old phenom, Cat Ferguson, who opened her season with third place in a reduced bunch sprint at the hilly Trofeo Alfredo Binda.
Give me Kopecky and Pidcock for the win, I guess, but this race is always great at the finish. It’s on Max on Saturday morning, for those of you who subscribe, so set your alarms.
And at the time, Vingegaard’s
Who won a stage and the green jersey through a series of climbing exploits that I, simply put, did not realize he had in him. He gets beat up by Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel in the classics, and you forget what an incredible, dynamic rider he is. He also basically does not register cold or rain, which was a force multiplier in conditions like these.
At least under that title; there was a race called Primavera Rosa that finished on the Cipressa and the Poggio for a few years a while back. But it hasn’t been held since 2006.
My plan for next week is to do another blow-by-blow from the Poggio to the finish line, as that was pretty well received last year