Strade Bianche!

The best race of the year, half the time

Photo Credit: Charly Lopez, ASO

I love Strade Bianche. On a purely aesthetic level, this is the most beautiful backdrop you’re going to find in any sport. Better than Augusta National, or Spa-Francorchamps, or Fenway Park, or the Rose Bowl, or…oh wait I take that back. I just remembered when the X Games¹ went to Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil and built the vert ramp right in front of the eponymous waterfall.

OK, that’s a better sports backdrop than Strade Bianche. Pretty sick, in the parlance of the time and venue.

But that’s the only one. The rolling hills, the pale gravel, the throngs of fans lining the narrow cobbled streets of Siena…you don’t see that every day, even in cycling. And a lot of you—even the casuals who are only here because you like my baseball writing, who sneer every time I mention FloBikes—can watch! Because this race is going to be broadcast live on Max, starting at 5:30 a.m. Saturday for the women and 8 a.m. for the men.

The demands of road cycling change from venue to venue, perhaps more than in any other sport. So much so that within an individual race, like the Tour de France, there could be four or five totally distinct types of athlete, with every variety of hybrid in between.

What I like about Strade Bianche is tests everyone. This year’s men’s course is 213 kilometers long and features 3,716 meters of elevation gain along the length of the route. There are no Alpine or Pyreneean-style mountains, but the climb to Montalcino is 6.5 kilometers long—formidable enough to count as a real mountain in a lesser stage race. So you have to be able to climb.

There are 15 gravel sectors, so you have to be able to deal with uneven road conditions. With a loose surface, riders have put down power, full stop, rather than drift along on power-to-weight ratio.

Because there’s so much grave, and because the course is almost never flat in the final 150 kilometers, it’s hard to conserve energy by drafting. Group dynamics and teamwork still matter, but there are no free rides.

The finale of the race is uphill over cobblestones, with the final turn a 90-degree right-hander onto a road that just is not wide enough for there to be more than one fast line through. It’s the ultimate test of nerve and bikehandling.

So what do I expect to happen?

Well, we’re getting an appearance from two-time champion Tadej Pogačar.

Last year, he went solo from 81 kilometers out and won. In his first victory, in 2022, he soloed in from 50 kilometers. Pogačar also won last year’s world road race championship on a hilly Swiss parcours with a 50 kilometer solo effort. He won the two monuments most similar to Strade Bianche as well: Il Lombardia with a 50 kilometer solo effort, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège with a 35 kilometer solo effort.

Pogačar didn’t contest Strade last year; Tom Pidcock won with…a 23 kilometer solo attack.

Pogačar is the best rider in the world, and the most well-rounded. He’s won eight of his past nine races dating back 50 weeks, a run that includes two monuments, a world championship, and two grand tour GCs. He hasn’t finished outside the top 10 in a mass start race since the 2022 World Road Race championship.

And Strade Bianche might be the event that suits him best of all. You know how I said it tests every possible quality a bike racer could have? Well, Pogačar can climb, and navigate cobbles, and put out power on a solo effort. That’s how he became the only male rider in the past 35 years to win a cobbled monument and a grand tour.

The biggest advantage he has is that all these heroic solo efforts and ludicrous win streaks are obviously in his competitors’ heads. He can attack at will, knowing the moment he drops the field, cooperation in the group behind him will totally collapse. Nobody thinks they can catch him, and nobody wants to put in the work to reel him back in if it means getting toasted in the sprint at the end of the race.

They’re not playing Mickey Mantle. They’re playing the pinstripes.

The only rider who I think could give him trouble on this parcours is the 2021 champion, Mathieu van der Poel. He’s the only other male rider with the same penchant for making good on suicidal long-range solo attacks, and the only rider with even a fraction of Pogačar’s fear factor. If Pogačar went from downtown, van der Poel has the power to get onto his wheel and stay there. That would open up a world of intriguing tactical possibilities.

But van der Poel’s not going to Strade Bianche. So Pogačar will win this race from as far out as he feels like it.

Good thing this isn’t the only Strade Bianche being contested on Saturday.

This is the 11th edition of Strade Bianche Donne. The first 10 editions have produced eight different champions, and nobody’s won it more than twice. The only constant is that SD Worx (or Boels-Dolmans, as it used to be called) has won this race seven years running and nine times overall.

That’s going to be tough to follow up on this year. Lotte Kopecky—like Pogačar the champion in 2022 and 2024, and reigning world road race champ—is sitting this race out in preparation for a Tour de France GC bid. That and the wild transfer market is going to make it next to impossible for SD Worx to dominate.²

Last week, I expressed my frustration that the big names were all in action but seemed to be dodging each other. No longer. Kopecky notwithstanding, everyone, and I mean everyone,³ is coming.

Thank God, Some Actual Racing

SD Worx is rolling out Anna van der Breggen, Mischa Bredewold, and Blanka Vas. Visma-Lease a Bike is bringing Fem van Empel and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who I am dying to see on this parcours. Fenix-Deceuninck is bringing a cyclocross-heavy squad that includes Puck Pieterse, Yara Kastelijn, and Annemarie Worst. EF Education-Oatly is leaving is North Americans home, but it is bringing its big offseason signing, the French GC rider Cédrine Kerbaol, and Tour Down Under champ Noemi Rüegg. Movistar is taking leader Lianne Lippert and ex-SD Worx locomotive Marlen Reusser.

For Liv Alula Jayco: 41-year-old Spanish climber Mavi García, who’s always good for a brave but doomed attack on an uphill, and Silke Smulders, who finished second to Rüegg at the Tour Down Under, a race with different vibes and a weaker startlist, but similar peak climbing demands. UAE Team ADQ is taking Elisa Longo Borghini, the only Italian and only non-SD Worx/Boels-Domans rider to win this race.

For Canyon-SRAM: three-time runner-up Kasia Niewiadoma, and her new running buddy, the indefatigable⁴ Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig. Lidl-Trek has 2016 winner Lizzie Deignan, who’s retiring at the end of the year, along with Niamh Fisher-Black and Olympic time trial silver medalist Anna Henderson.

And of course: Demi Vollering is coming. And after years of having to fight off her own teammates for leadership here, she’s the clear no. 1 on a squad that’s⁵ loaded for bear: The big engine of Juliette Labous, and Dutch puncheur Loes Adegeest.

There are two inclusions here I’m kind of fascinated by. The two teams I’d single out as favorites—SD Worx and FDJ-Suez—both have superstar leaders who’ll need support. But both teams are bringing pure sprinters: Lorena Wiebes for SD Worx, Ally Wollaston for FDJ.

Maybe both teams need live bodies to round out the squad—women’s teams are much smaller than men’s teams, after all, and specialization can be a luxury, especially this early in the season. Maybe they’re going to be used to pace the peloton early on; Wiebes in particular has been a decent tow truck in spots in the past. And there’s a lot less climbing in the women’s version of Strade Bianche; no Montalcino, for instance.

But I can’t stress this enough: It is impossible to have a sprint finish in this race. The last couple minutes of Pogačar’s win last year aren’t great drama, but if you don’t know how narrow and winding—to say nothing of mostly uphill!—the finale is, you’ll get the idea from this video.

I’m probably overthinking this, and Wiebes and Wollaston are just there for shits and gigs, and they’ll get dropped outside of Siena and we won’t think about them again until Milan-San Remo two weekends from now.

Either way, I’m pretty pumped. Just as the men’s Strade Bianche looks like a foregone conclusion, Strade Bianche Donne is shaping up to be a total circus.

1. I Googled around looking for either photos or a video I could embed, and one of the suggested searches was “Do the X Games still exist?” Which was kind of hilariously pitiful.

2. Because Kopecky’s not coming, bib numbers have apparently been distributed in alphabetical order by team name. That means Urška Žigart of AG Insurance-Soudal, Pogačar’s partner, is wearing no. 1.

3. No, of course I don’t mean literally everyone. There’s no Kristen Faulkner, no Marianne Vos, no Neve Bradbury, no Gaia Realini, just to name a few. But almost everyone.

4. And, depending on who you ask, either charming or cloying

5. At the risk of using an idiom that’s completely nonsensical in this context