Milan-San Remo 2015

The road

How it was won

1. 1151 km to go

   Ten minutes become five on the Turchino

   Eleven escapees carried ten minutes across the Po beyond Pavia, but Katusha and Trek have ground away at the front all morning and the lead is halved by the tunnel at the summit. Over the pass the rain finally relents and the race drops towards a Riviera that is cold, grey and — crucially — drying.

2. 239 km to go

   Sky force the Capo Berta

   Luke Rowe takes the last of the capi by the scruff with Geraint Thomas and Ben Swift glued to him. On the descent Salvatore Puccio's wheels slide away beneath him, and the three Sky riders find themselves with daylight. Rowe does not sit up.

3. 327 km to go

   Swallowed at the foot of the Cipressa

   Rowe's trio hoover up the last survivors of the morning break on the seafront at Santo Stefano al Mare, twenty-seven kilometres from home. Orica-GreenEdge have kept the bunch on a short leash all the way, and the move is reeled in exactly as the climb begins.

4. 417 km to go

   Oss and Thomas slip away

   Filippo Pozzato has his cameo on the descent and is gone by the bottom of it. As the road flattens along the coast at San Lorenzo al Mare, Daniel Oss and Geraint Thomas ease clear instead, Oss doing almost all of the work; their lead will stretch to thirty seconds before the Poggio.

5. 56 km to go

   The Poggio comes apart

   Seventeen seconds is all Oss and Thomas have left when the gradient bites, and once it does Thomas strikes out alone, hunched over the bars with San Remo laid out below him. Paolini drives the bunch for Kristoff and takes nothing back. Seven hundred metres from the top Philippe Gilbert lets fly, the chase group finally cracks open, and it is his own teammate Greg Van Avermaet who rips through it and sets off after the Welshman.

6. 64 km to go

   Carnage on the descent

   Van Avermaet catches Thomas and leads the plunge through the hairpins, and behind him the race falls apart in the worst way: Gilbert, Gerald Ciolek, Zdeněk Štybar and Michał Kwiatkowski all hit the deck and their day is over. Sagan, who briefly finds himself at the very head of the race, has burned a match he will want back.

7. 7At the line

   Degenkolb wins La Primavera

   Van Avermaet relents inside the last two kilometres and Paolini delivers Kristoff to the front with a kilometre to go. But the Via Roma after seven hours is a finishing straight like no other: the defending champion has to open from too far out, the almost imperceptible rise drags at him, and in the last fifty metres John Degenkolb — who has not shown his face in the wind all day — swoops past. Kristoff just holds off Michael Matthews for second.

The result