The Final Monument
Pogačar is all that matters
I think I’m starting to feel a little sorry for Remco Evenepoel. Yeah, the guy who in the past three months finished third at the Tour de France and followed that up with two Olympic gold medals and a world championship.
Because if not for Tadej Pogačar, we’d be talking about what an incredible season Remco is having, about his unusual versatility, his ability to race over varied terrain, over one day or three weeks. We’d probably be talking about him as the favorite for Il Lombardia.
But I’m not really sure what, short of a crash or an act of God,1 could prevent Pogačar from winning this race.
Every fact about Pogačar sounds exaggerated. He’s won this race three years running, and has never failed to win an edition he’s entered. He’s won his last three starts in one-day races. He’s finished in the top 10 in every one-day race he’s entered in the past 17 months, dating back to 2023 Liège-Bastogne-Liège, when he fell and broke his wrist. His last outside-the-top-10 one-day race before that came at the 2022 World Road Race Championship, where Evenepoel stormed away and Pogačar finished back in the pack in 19th.
And this race has Pogačar written all over it. Il Lombardia is unique among monuments in that it features actual mountains—seven listed climbs, four of them more than nine kilometers in length. That’s enough to knock out the quote-unquote classics specialists—Alpecin-Deceuninck’s preliminary roster doesn’t even feature Mathieu van der Poel, for example. It’s just down to the climbers, of which Pogačar is among the best in the world, and the puncheurs, of which Pogačar is the best in the world by some distance.
I’m trying to figure out how you’d contrive a tactical plan to beat Pogačar. You can’t use multiple leaders to roll attacks on him—he’s got one of the best teams in the race, with Marc Hirschi and Adam Yates in tow. UAE will just send a rider along to sit on any attacker. You can’t push the tempo, because the first two climbs summit less than a fifth of the way through the course. So you’ve exhausted your big engines and now your leader is alone with Pogačar, looking at 200 kilometers of open road?
You can’t drag the tempo and slow the race down, bringing a big group to the final climb, the punchy San Fermo della Battaglia, which is 2.8 kilometers at a 6.7% gradient. Pogačar eats those hills up—he’ll dust everyone. We saw him do it on Côte de La Redoute in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. And at Strade Bianche and at worlds and a million other places.
I guess the hope is that the final climb isn’t quite selective enough—it’s not as steep as the Redoute—for Pogačar to crush everyone so comprehensively? He keeps trying to do it at Milan-San Remo but he can never make it stick. But then again, the final climb is tougher than the Poggio.
Of course, all of this tactical nonsense implies that Pogačar is a purely reactive participant, and not the protagonist. That he won’t attack earlier, most likely on the penultimate and longest climb of the day, the Colma di Sormano. That hill is is 13.1 kilometers at 6.5 percent, with a gradient of 10.6 percent between kilometer markers six and seven, and a gradient of 8.3 percent in the final 1.6 kilometers. It’s like a Côte de La Redoute on top of a medium-sized grand tour climb.
If Pogačar even waits that long. The Colma di Sormano crests at kilometer marker 210 out of 252, which is between 40 and 60 kilometers closer to the finish that Pogačar traditionally attacks. And at that point, all cohesion in the chase group falls apart as everyone realizes they’re racing for second.
The only way around this that I can see is a banzai charge down one of the last two climbs that forces Pogačar to chase solo. Maybe this is Tom Pidcock’s angle. And even then Pogačar isn’t a bad descender.
Or it could take something like what happened at one of the warmup races, Gran Piemonte, which Pogačar skipped. Neilson Powless won with a 40-plus kilometer solo break, as the peloton struggled to form up and get organized until it was too late.
Can Pogačar be out-Pogačared? I don’t know. I went through his one-day race results over the past four seasons and couldn’t find a long solo breakaway winner other than Pogačar himself. If someone like Evenepoel or Matteo Jorgenson or Pidcock goes early, they’ll be closed down immediately. It would have to be a rider like Powless, a strong contender but not a star or a favorite, who would get enough rope to become dangerous.
I don’t know if Pogačar winning Il Lombardia would be more or less ridiculous given what’s come before. Neither of the two previous male Triple Crown winners took home even a single monument in their Triple Crown seasons; it would be a surprise if at the end of the weekend Pogačar didn’t have two. Only five male riders have won a grand tour and at least one monument in the same year they won a world championship: Alfredo Binda, Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Evenepoel, and now Pogačar.
So that’s the best rider of four distinct generations, three of whom are among the defensible answers for the greatest of all time. And Evenepoel. You understand why I’m starting to feel sorry for him.
I’m not going to bother prediction the podium. Pogačar is all that matters.
Which is not out of the question since Tre Valli Varesine got rained out this week