All eyes are on Tadej Pogačar ahead of this weekend as the world champion prepares to kick off his season at Strade Bianche, but the Slovenian’s mind would appear to be elsewhere.
On Tuesday, four days out from the race, the UAE Team Emirates-XRG leader was not riding on the famous white gravel tracks in the Tuscan countryside but up and around the Ligurian coastline, deep into the route of another Italian Classic, Milan-San Remo.
Pogačar has been spotted on the course of La Classicissima a few times in recent months and now he has raised eyebrows with a new record time on the Cipressa, the penultimate climb of Milan-San Remo and the one crucial to his hopes and dreams at the race.
It takes a bit of scraping around in the Strava app, but the fitness tracking platform shows that Pogačar went up the Cipressa – which measures 5.58km at an average gradient of 4.2% – in a time of 8:51. For context, Pogačar holds the KOM, or course record, for that particular Strava ‘segment’ with a time of 8:57, set at last year’s Milan-San Remo when he blew the field apart with a stunning volley of accelerations. Sub 9-minutes was until recently seen as a holy grail.
This new ‘record’ must be taken with a massive pinch of salt. For starters, it’s not an official KOM but a ‘personal record’. The 8:57 KOM still stands, and that’s because Pogačar did not publicly upload his Tuesday ride, meaning it’s not visible on his profile and his times on various segments are not visible on any leaderboards.
He may be keen to keep a low profile but what’s even more likely is that Pogačar was motor-pacing up the climb. This is a common training method where riders sit in the slipstream of a motorbike driven by a coach, which helps adapt for high-speed scenarios and accelerations. Naturally, such efforts are invalid for the purposes of Strava’s leaderboards, although many amateurs do try and get away with it, while other users angrily ‘flag’ suspicious activities.
It’s impossible to know how long Pogačar was behind the moto, or whether he had other teammates with him, so it’s impossible to put his time into context.
What’s clear, though, is that he is once again preparing to drop a bomb on the Cipressa on March 21. For so many years, the Cipressa failed to have much of an impact on Milan-San Remo, with matters decided up and over the Poggio later on.
However, Pogačar’s quest to land perhaps the most untameable of the Monuments in the past couple of years has ripped up the script. Last year was a landmark moment as he blew most of the peloton off his wheel with repeated accelerations on the climb. Most, but not all. Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech) and Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) clung grimly on and, after no further separation on the Poggio, Van der Poel took it out in a three-up sprint.
Pogačar knows he realistically needs to go one better and so solo over the Cipressa, which would give him wins in four of the five Monuments and further enshrine his status in the cycling annals. Much will depend on his teammates, who have failed to get into line from the very bottom of the Cipressa in recent years, and now count without injured teammates Tim Wellens and Jhonatan Narvaez.
However, Pogačar’s latest visit to the Milan-San Remo course underlines the strength of his own appetite.
So while he returns to Strade Bianche in search of a fourth victory on Saturday, you can perhaps sense that a first triumph at La Classicissima is what’s truly firing him up this Spring.
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