Milan-San Remo 2010

The road

At the start

Boonen the favourite, Freire the ghost

Milan in the drizzle, 298 kilometres, seven hours before anyone learns who is strongest. Tom Boonen carries the favourite's weight after a Tirreno-Adriatico where he climbed and sprinted well. Mark Cavendish wears number one but has conceded he cannot defend it, so HTC will not police the day. Petacchi, Bennati, Hushovd and Farrar all wait for the Poggio — and Óscar Freire, twice a winner, waits on nobody's radar.

How it was won

1. 1150 km to go

   Chaos on the Turchino descent

   The road tips down off the Turchino toward the sea and the peloton comes apart on it. Mark Cavendish, the reigning champion, is caught on the wrong side of the split and HTC-Columbia spend the next hour chasing their own race back. Murilo Fischer does not get up at all: broken collarbone, and his day ends in the ditch.

2. 295 km to go

   Le Mànie eats the escape

   Piemontesi, Ratti and Caccia have been out front since the outskirts of Milan, once by twenty-two minutes. On the ramps above Varigotti that cushion is down to two, and the three of them can hear the race coming.

3. 340 km to go

   Grabovskyy storms Capo Berta

   Maxime Bouet has been away alone since sixty kilometres out, forty seconds of pure optimism. Dmytro Grabovskyy is the only one of seven chasers to reach him — and he does not stop to say hello, going straight past on the Berta. By Imperia the peloton has him back.

4. 422 km to go

   The Cipressa nobody wants

   Milram lead onto the penultimate climb and the bunch follows without appetite. Alexandr Kolobnev jabs near the top; nobody bites. Everything is being saved for one hill, and everybody knows which.

5. 56 km to go

   All-out war on the Poggio

   Yoann Offredo's move off the Cipressa is still hanging in the air when Stefano Garzelli drags the whole race onto the Poggio at a murderous tempo. He swings off and Michael Rogers tears clean off the front; Philippe Gilbert answers, then Filippo Pozzato answers Gilbert, and for two hundred metres the hedges of San Remo hold the best one-day riders in the world flat out against each other. Pozzato crests first, alone, the Italian champion's jersey burning in the afternoon light — and behind him, far too close, comes everybody.

6. 61 km to go

   Nibali dives, the race breathes

   Vincenzo Nibali throws himself down the hairpins and takes Pozzato, Gilbert, Hushovd and Breschel with him. Pozzato has one flourish left and uses it with two kilometres to go. Then the road flattens, Liquigas take the front, and twenty-five riders are together again with nothing left to decide but the sprint.

7. 7At the line

   Freire slides out of the slipstream

   Seven hours of racing and Óscar Freire has spent almost none of them at the front. He comes out of the Liquigas train from third wheel, opens up on the Lungomare and finishes a clean bike length clear of Tom Boonen, with Alessandro Petacchi third. A third Milan-San Remo, to go with three rainbow jerseys.

The result