Tirreno-Adriatico 2022 - Preview

A shift in dates sees Tirreno-Adriatico overlap entirely with Paris-Nice this season, and the Italian event offers a unique selling point to viewers unsure of what to watch over the next week, as Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Remco Evenepoel (QuickStep-AlphaVinyl) line up in the same stage race for the very first time.

Both riders turned professional in 2019 and their immediate impact made them the figureheads of cycling’s marked shift towards youth. Teenaged neo-professionals were once a rarity; now they are effectively the norm. Labelling under-23 riders as espoirs is seemingly redundant in an era when young hopes are increasingly expected to win big in the here and now.

Few among them shoulder quite as weighty expectations as Pogačar and Evenepoel. Pogačar won his first Tour de France a few days shy of his 22nd birthday. Evenepoel was European time trial champion at the age of 19. Every time they pin on a race number, they are called upon to perform similar feats of strength.

One wonders how sustainable that is in the long term but for now Pogačar and Evenepoel are two of the most bankable talents in the peloton. Pogačar started 2022 with another overall victory at the UAE Tour, while Evenepoel quickly digested a rare stage racing defeat at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana by winning the Volta ao Algarve. By this point, it would already have been more newsworthy if he hadn’t.

In Grand Tours, Pogačar is already at the zenith. Evenepoel nurtures ambitions of eventually joining him there, and he will measure himself against Pogačar’s benchmark across three weeks at the Vuelta a España later in the year. 

In shorter stage races, Evenepoel’s own record is an imposing one, even if he acknowledged in the Algarve that winning WorldTour events was another challenge altogether. Evenepoel’s sole WorldTour stage race win to date came at the 2020 Tour de Pologne – though it’s worth noting that he has only raced four WorldTour stage races in his entire career, and one of those was last year’s Giro d’Italia.

Tirreno-Adriatico, then, marks the next phase in Evenepoel’s development. The route, with a short time trial, a succession of hilly days and no summit finish, certainly caters to his array of skills, but the depth of a WorldTour peloton – and, above all, the presence of Pogačar – makes this a new kind of challenge for the Belgian. Monday’s opening time trial in Lido di Camaiore, 13.9km in length, offers Evenepoel the chance to make a fast start and lay down an early marker.

In the Algarve, Evenepoel seemed to be road-testing a new, more measured mode of racing. Rather than deliver a show of force on the first summit finish at Alto da Fòia, he waited patiently for the stage 4 time trial. In Italy, one imagines the preferred scenario would be to get out in front early in the time trial and then try to manage that lead over the remainder of the week. 

But as last year demonstrated, just about anything can happen on any given day at the race between the two seas. The prospect of a Pogačar-Evenepoel duel is the headline story before the race gets underway, but the cast of characters is so rich that multiple subplots will emerge as the week progresses.

The other contenders

Evenepoel’s teammate Julian Alaphilippe is ostensibly at Tirreno-Adriatico to build towards Milan-San Remo and the Ardennes, but stage wins and perhaps even a GC challenge are equally within the world champion’s gift if the mood strikes him. 

Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) is perhaps a more obvious disrupter of the expected Evenepoel-Pogačar hegemony. The Dane scored a breakthrough when he emerged as Pogačar’s dauphin at last year’s Tour de France and he began 2022 with a striking solo victory at the Drôme Classic. He is joined in the Jumbo-Visma line-up by two more riders who were already on form last weekend, Sepp Kuss and Tiesj Benoot.

Richard Carapaz has been a most reliable performer across his time at Ineos, and the Ecuadorian continues his Giro d’Italia build-up here at the head of a team that also includes Richie Porte and Filippo Ganna. The world time trial champion was initially slated to ride Paris-Nice, but he has been drafted into the Tirreno squad. Despite a rare defeat at the UAE Tour, Ganna is the favourite to win the opening time trial, and this year’s route might allow him to test his own capabilities as a stage race rider.

Enric Mas (Movistar) was already to the fore at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana, while Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ) will look to build on his encouraging finish to the Tour des Alpes Maritimes et du Var. Bora-Hansgrohe bring two of their Giro leaders in Wilco Kelderman and Emanuel Buchmann, while Rigoberto Uran and Mark Padun line out for a solid EF-EasyPost squad and Giulio Ciccone leads the line for Trek-Segafredo and Jakob Fulgsang features for Israel Premier Tech.

Despite Vincenzo Nibali’s absence, Astana-Qazaqstan field Miguel Angel Lopez and Gianni Moscon, while Bahrain Victorious will start with ambition thanks to Matej Mohorič , though one imagines Damiano Caruso would have preferred a set-piece summit finish.

Beyond the GC contenders, the Tirreno-Adriatico gruppo is, as ever, replete with Classics men building towards late March and April. Michael Matthews (BikeExchange-Jayco), Kasper Asgreen (QuickStep-AlphaVinyl), Peter Sagan (TotalEnergies), Greg Van Avermaet (AG2R-Citroën) and Florian Vermeersch (Lotto Soudal) are among those who will look to test themselves across the week.

A notable cadre of sprinters is also on hand with a view to Milan-San Remo. Past winners Mark Cavendish (QuickStep-AlphaVinyl), Arnaud Démare (Groupama-FDJ) and Alexander Kristoff (Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert) are present, together with Caleb Ewan (Lotto Soudal), Elia Viviani (Ineos) and Nacer Bouhanni (Arkéa-Samsic). Every pedal stroke brings the Via Roma a little closer.

The route

There are a few novelties to the 2022 Tirreno-Adriatico, beginning with that new date, which sees the race finish some six days before Milan-San Remo rather than the traditional four. To compensate, RCS Sport have slotted a sprinter-friendly version of Milano-Torino – Superga is sadly excised from the route – into the calendar on March 16 to allow La Classicissima contenders keep ticking over ahead of the main event.

The race again starts in Lido di Camaiore and finishes in San Benedetto del Tronto, but this time out, the individual time trial takes place on the opening day. The result of that flat, 13.9km test will dictate strategy for much of the remainder of the week.

Stage 2 from Camaiore to Sovicille takes in the rippling hills around Siena but the flat finale should offer the sprinters their first opportunity of the race. The fast men will again be to the fore on stage 3 as the race crosses into Umbria for a finish in Terni.

The terrain grows more rugged as the race traverses the Apennines and reaches Abruzzo on stage 4, the 202km trek from Cascata delle Marmore to Bellante. The stage concludes with three laps over a short but sharp (3.8km at 7 per cent) finishing climb in Bellante. It would a surprise indeed if Alaphilippe were not prominent on a finale like this.

It’s a foretaste of what is to come on stage 5, where five stiff muri punctuate the finale in Fermo. The stage is short, at 155km, and the succession of climbs will splinter the gruppo. The climbs of Muro di Monte Urano,  Capodarco (with its 18% gradient), Strada Calderari and Madonnetta d’Ete feature in the run-in, with the race tackling the stiff Strada Calderari for a second time en route to the uphill finish in Fermo. The steepest part comes with 3km to go, where the gradient ratchets up to 21 per cent. It promises to be brutal.

On the penultimate day, Tirreno-Adriatico shifts further northwards in the Marche for the longest climbs of the race. The 215km run from Apecchio to Carpegna takes in twin ascents of Monte Carpegna (6km at 9.9 per cent) before the 12km drop to the finish. Monte Carpegna featured on stage 8 of the 2014 Giro, when Diego Ulissi emerged victorious at Montecopiolo, but the ascent is most famous as the late Marco Pantani’s preferred test site. Rather than reconnoitre the Giro, so the story goes, Pantani would simply say, ‘Il Carpegna mi basta.’ (Carpegna is enough for me).

It should also be enough to decide the 2022 Tirreno-Adriatico. The race returns down the coast on the final day for a largely flat run around San Benedetto del Tronto, with a bunch sprint all but a certainty on Viale Buozzi.