Another race, another Tadej Pogačar exhibition. You can pretty much write the script these days: a long-range solo attack (Il Lombardia was only treated to a 48km move), and a winning margin as big as it was preposterous (three minutes and 16 seconds to Remco Evenepoel in second). Same old, same old. The slayer, destroyer, and conqueror did what was so predictable that L’Equipe rated him as a five star pre-race favourite and left the four and three star options blank, such is the chasm between the world champion and the rest.
Yet if you wind the clock back an hour before his inevitable explosive attack, Lombardia had a different process en-route to the same outcome. Such is Pogačar’s dominance – scratch that, for it’s not even dominance anymore, it’s his sport and he’s just letting others partake for the pretty pictures, ‘cos Tadej’s nice like that – that all other teams en masse realised at the season’s latest possible juncture that they have to think outside the box and be proactive as opposed to reactive. Instead of the usual five- or six-man break, what went clear was a mammoth breakaway of 22 riders, the sort you only really see in the dying embers of a Grand Tour when several teams are fearing the wrath of their sponsors for not delivering more than a few seconds of TV coverage.
What separated it from those desperate composite breaks, however, was the personnel and teams involved: Bahrain, not so Victorious this year, were represented by their three big hitters: Matej Mohorič, Antonio Tiberi and Damiano Caruso; a Tom Pidcock-less Ineos Grenadiers counted Thymen Arensman and Brandon Rivera; Visma-Lease a Bike, upstaged all season by UAE Team Emirates, had Wilco Kelderman and Tiesj Benoot; and Eddie Dunbar (Jayco-AlUla) and Dani Martínez (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe), both off the back of Grand Tour successes, were also present. Three other teams had double representation, and only four WorldTour teams were missing: Arkea-B&B Hotels, Cofidis, EF Education-EasyPost and Intermarché-Wanty.
The responsibility to bring them back, then, laid squarely at the front wheels of UAE Team Emirates. They could expect a bit of help from EF, but no-one else was going to assist them. True, this wasn’t new: UAE assume the position as race leaders pretty much every single race, but here was a new conundrum for them: how do you stop a powerful group of almost two dozen from building an unassailable lead? And if you do that (tick, they did, the gap got close but didn’t surpass five minutes), then how do you counter the moves from behind when almost all the other teams have satellite riders out front?
It was an unforeseen and clever collective decision designed to make Tadej and his boys to do a bit of thinking. It’s as if, on the last day of high-stakes racing (sorry, Tour of Guangxi), they all just cottoned on to the fact that when the Slovenian pulls the fuse on his ticking time bomb, no-one is able to keep up with him. Ah, he’s quite good, this Tadej lad, you can imagine everyone from Evenepoel to Ben O’Connor has been saying all season. Looks like I won’t be able to follow.
Now quite obviously with a team that contained Marc Hirschi (winner of seven one day races this season), Rafał Majka, Adam Yates and Pavel Sivakov, restricting this large group was no bother for UAE – it’s almost like buying the best riders in the world and making them work for the maybe the best ever rider works – and Pogačar passed the test, duly winning his fourth consecutive Il Lombardia. We can moan about the peloton’s belated realisation to the fact that he has been repeatedly thumping them in the face all season more times than Tyson Fury has hit his own punch bag, but we ought to cut them some slack. At least they tried. Pogi, you got any participation certificates over there?
The biggest intrigue from the early and thought-provoking racing in Lombardia was what it might mean for what will lie in store in 2025. The peloton cannot let the 26-year-old continue to win every single bike race next year. This season’s been historic and, such is its uniqueness, it’s been fun. But it can’t endure. Riders need to be on the front foot more, get over their cohesion allergies and actually work together for more than a few pedal strokes before quibbling, and confront the challenge as one as to how you beat Mr Indomitable. Il Lombardia 2024 should be seen as the testing ground, the day when a few ideas were thrown together, the genesis of a method to stop The Unbeatable One.
