Milan-San Remo 2021

The road

At the start

The Monument as a closed shop

Milano, and the most open Monument of them all suddenly looks bolted shut. Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert and Julian Alaphilippe arrive off a spring nobody has lived with, and 299 kilometres of Ligurian coast exist only to deliver the three of them to the Poggio. Behind them the fast men wait — Ewan, Matthews, Kristoff, Sagan — hoping this is the year the climb hands them the Via Roma.

How it was won

1. 122 km to go

   The Cipressa swallows the break

   The last of the escapees is reeled in as the peloton powers up through the olive and pine terraces. Nobody attacks, but the tempo alone is brutal enough to spit out Gaviria and force Ewan and Kristoff deep into the red.

2. 29 km to go

   Ganna flattens the Poggio

   Ineos hit the narrow right-hand deviation at the foot of the climb with the time trial world champion on the front. Ganna simply keeps going, stringing the race into a single line and refusing to let the Poggio become a launchpad.

3. 35 km to go

   The big three cancel each other out

   Alaphilippe throws the first punch at the steepest pitch and Van Aert goes with him, forcing Van der Poel to chase from further back. But the move lacks venom, riders trickle back across, and the three best climbers in the race glance at one another instead of committing. The Poggio, for once, decides nothing.

4. 43 km to go

   A sprint looks certain

   A dozen riders drop off the top together and Pidcock leads them down the twisting descent. Matthews, Ewan, Schachmann and even Sagan are all still there — every calculation now points to a bunch sprint on the Via Roma.

5. 52 km to go

   Stuyven goes all-in

   With two kilometres left and every sprinter waiting for the other, Jasper Stuyven simply rides away from them. Kragh Andersen claws across and the Belgian looks certain to be swamped, but he kicks once more inside the final hundred metres — a rider with no sprint beating the fastest men in the world by refusing to sprint at all.

6. 6At the line

   Via Roma

   Stuyven crosses with his arms up, the bunch a bike length too late behind him. Trek-Segafredo win the longest one-day race on the calendar by a matter of metres.

The result