If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It
Strade Bianche was a powerful argument for quitting a job you hate
Nobody had a better day at Strade Bianche than Demi Vollering. She overcame crashes and mechanicals to come into Siena alongside her teammate-turned-DS-turned-frenemy-turned-archrival Anna van der Breggen.
I didn’t catch most of this race live, because even though I woke up ridiculously early for a Saturday, the whole thing was over by like 8 a.m. on the East Coast. What I did catch made me laugh out loud. You’ll get the gist of it starting at about 4:20 in the highlight video below.
Van der Breggen came onto the final ramp, about 600 to 700 meters from the finish, in first position. With streets this narrow and nobody else in striking distance, there’s barely any space for Vollering to come around and take a turn, and zero incentive for her to do so. So van der Breggen does the only thing she really can do: Try to get the drop on Vollering and attack from the front. Maybe she’d be able to ride Vollering off her wheel. Even a small gap is tough to close in those conditions.
Except the attack didn’t even register. Van der Breggen got up and pedaled like hell, and not only could she not shake Vollering, Vollering didn’t even need to get out of her saddle. She didn’t budge an inch.
Having weathered—if you want to call it that—her rival’s last full measure, Vollering popped up, swung around van der Breggen, and disappeared. You can see how much bigger a gear Vollering’s using as she attacks; she’s putting real power down as van der Breggen is spinning her pedals just trying to keep moving forward. Absolute Crocodile Dundee-ass shit.
The final margin—18 seconds—probably overstates how much time Vollering was able to put into van der Breggen in 500 meters. Once Vollering was gone, and with the chasers another 90 seconds behind, I imagine van der Breggen eased up and focused on just making it to the line. But the “Oh wow, how impressive it is that van der Breggen’s doing so well” chat is sounding more patronizing by the week. Because she’s just not in Vollering’s class anymore.
In fact, if we’re going to talk about an impressive un-retirement, how about the fact that Pauline Ferrand-Prévot came back from a mid-race crash to finish on the podium? She ended up a minute and 42 seconds behind Vollering, but she outdragged fellow Frenchwoman Juliette Labous around the final corner.
And speaking of Labous: More than once in this race, she turned herself inside-out to put Vollering in position to win. That’s why Vollering left SD Worx; rather than the every-woman-for-herself situation she increasingly found herself in, Vollering now has the complete devotion of a world-class time trialist, among others, to help her beat seven shades of shit out of her ex-teammates. Even if she’s being coy about whether this season could accurately be described as a revenge rampage.
Somewhat more surprising: The boys actually gave us a good race as well.
Rather than link back to the dozens of times I’ve written about this effect, I’ll just quickly summarize what happens when Tadej Pogačar lines up in a hilly classics race, especially Strade Bianche. Pogačar is the best puncheur in the world, and he has—if not the strongest team in the sport, then close to it. So UAE rides like hell to keep the break in check and drop the flotsam from the peloton, and when the ground has been sufficiently softened and the terrain is sufficiently selective, Pogačar goes alone.
What usually happens when a rider attacks—especially from long range—is that the other favorites and their surviving teammates work together to reel him or her in. A group of cyclists is always faster than one solo cyclist. But when Pogačar attacks, everyone behind gives up, figuring they’re not going to catch him anyway.
Here’s what I wanted from this race: For Mathieu van der Poel to follow Pogačar’s initial long-range attack. Of all the cyclists in the peloton, van der Poel is maybe the only one who can match Pogačar’s combination of fear factor and penchant for long solo efforts. Pogačar is not powerful enough to drop van der Poel on a short climb and keep him behind for 30 or 50 or 80 kilometers, and if van der Poel were to attach himself to Pogačar’s wheel, he’s such a superior sprinter that Pogačar would have to shake him before they came into Siena.
I don’t think van der Poel would beat Pogačar on this parcours, but I thought he—and perhaps he alone—could make Pogačar play the chess game further into the race than his initial attack. To make moves and countermoves, to improvise. The more he has to freelance, the greater (if nonetheless remote) chance he makes a fatal mistake.
All that is well and good, but van der Poel didn’t entire Strade Bianche this year.
Lucky for me, Tom Pidcock did. Pidcock is feelin’ it on a level I did not realize he was capable of feelin’ it. Some years ago, I quit a job that was taking a massive toll on my mental health, and when I showed up to therapy the following week, my shrink told me he could tell that I’d quit because my entire demeanor had changed. I felt like a new man.
It appears that leaving Ineos Grenadiers has had a similar effect on Pidders. This is not a Vollering situation, where he’s now at the head of a powerful team devoted to him. I typed that sentence out and thought to myself, “Wait, I’ve completely forgotten who else is on Q36.5.”12
Pidcock didn’t have the equivalent of a Labous riding for him, but it didn’t matter. It was completely inevitable that Pogačar would be the one to animate the race; it was up to his rivals to hang with him. It could’ve been anyone, but Pidcock was the only one with the legs and the guts to try.
It almost worked. Ultimately, Pogačar put Pidcock to the sword and won by almost a minute and a half. But he had to wait until he was inside the 20-kilometer marker to do it. OK, maybe that’s not almost, but in the spirit of the montage of the three most successful Vegas casino robberies in Ocean’s Eleven, Pidcock got two steps closer to the door than any living soul before him.
Pidcock did something I haven’t seen in a while: He made Pogačar look uncomfortable. Pogačar is stronger than almost everyone in almost any environment, but going up and down over a loose surface, he had to work to keep up his speed as Pidcock glided through.
I didn’t think Pidcock would be able to gap Pogačar the way he might if they were coming down Alpe d’Huez. But every time Pidcock freewheeled at speed down a hill by taking the perfect cornering line, and Pogačar had to pump the pedals at the bottom of the run in order to keep up, Pidcock saved a few calories’ worth of energy. I thought that maybe that would add up to even things out on the final run in to Siena.
I did not expect Pogačar to crash.
With about 50 kilometers left, Pidcock aced a gentle left-hand bend, while Pogačar wiped out, slid all the way across the width of the road, bounced over the lip of the road, and tumbled ass-over-tea-kettle into a sticker bush.
Now, it’s been a minute since I’ve been in a bike crash, but that looked profoundly uncomfortable. Pogačar didn’t suffer anything more than cuts and scrapes. Well, he suffered the indignity of doing the last hour and change of the race with his bare asscheek hanging out of his torn shorts, for an intercontinental audience to see. But that didn’t cost him any time.
But in a sport where every acceleration has to be measured, the adrenaline rush of getting up from a crash can be draining. It can compound with the energy necessary to make up those lost seconds, and the additional effort required to offset the further loss of confidence in future high-speed downhill sections.
I didn’t think that crash itself would take Pogačar out, but I thought it might weaken him enough to bring him down from the supernatural level to a place where Pidcock would have a shot at breaking him.
That obviously didn’t happen; when Pogačar really put the screws to Pidcock, the Brit slid off his wheel almost as quickly as van der Breggen had slid off Vollering’s a couple hours before.
But I’m not sure it had to be that way. As much as Pidcock’s exuberant confidence allowed him to put Pogačar under serious pressure, I think the needle swung too far in the other direction.
It was Pidcock, not Pogačar, who launched the attack that broke up the last remnants of the peloton with just under 80 kilometers to go. When the two of them rode off into the distance with Connor Swift, the final survivor of the breakaway, Pidcock did at least half of the work at the front of the trio, rather than trying to goad Pogačar into taking on a share of the burden commensurate with his status as race favorite.
And then Pidcock waited for Pogačar after the crash. Which was laudable sportsmanship. Pidcock’s won this race before; he’d rather beat Pogačar fair and square, rather than have everyone say he only won because he left Pogačar for dead. It’d be ungallant.
It turns out he didn’t have the choice between winning in the most chivalrous manner possible and winning by any means necessary. Pogačar’s dominance is such that it renders sportsmanship almost irrelevant. Show him any gentlemanly quarter, and he’ll beat you. He’s too good to take in a fair fight.
But he makes mistakes. He bleeds, both literally and metaphorically. Is he so good he can win whenever he wants no matter what? Maybe. But we’ll only find out for sure if more riders make him work for it, like Pidcock did on Saturday.
Shout out one of my favorite cycling names: Harm Vanhoucke
Harm Vanhoucke, whom I often get confused with Hugo “Here Comes the” Hofstetter