The spring Classics are over and Grand Tour season is about to begin, with the Ardennes triple rounding out two months of thrilling competition on the cobbles and hills of Belgium and France.
The series of one-day races, running from Opening Weekend to the Monuments of the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, have brought with them the usual mix of drama, surprise results, and star showdowns.
We’ve looked back over the spring season to comb through the races, results and reaction to bring you the major takeaways from the campaign. Here are our 10 conclusions from the 2023 spring Classics.
Classics have elevated Pogacar to the realm of the GOATs
It is difficult to find enough superlatives to describe Tadej Pogačar‘s Spring Classics campaign and what it means for him and pro cycling’s history. His crashing out of Liège-Bastogne-Liège and not being able to go for the Ardennes triple in no way overshadows his impact this season.
Pogačar’s presence in the Classics was a breath of fresh air and fans could watch in amazement to see what he could do against the best Classics specialists of the current generation. No other Tour de France champion has done what Pogačar did this spring.
No male rider who has won the Tour de France has also won the Tour of Flanders since Eddy Merckx – until this year. The Classics were widely snubbed by the lightweight climbers who can soar over the Alps and Pyrenees in July. Unless you’re Marianne Vos, you haven’t won the Tour of Flanders and Flèche Wallonne in the same year. Not even Merckx could manage that. And if you add in a Paris-Nice victory to the equation? Amazing.
It’s a fascinating shift away from the narrow specialization that characterised most of the recent Tour winners. During his Tour de France reign, Chris Froome eschewed all of the Spring Classics except Liège-Bastogne-Liège and never featured prominently there. There are a few exceptions – Vincenzo Nibali’s win in Milan-San Remo and Brad Wiggins’ solid attempt at Paris-Roubaix – but it has been decades since there has been a rider as complete as Tadej Pogačar.
Anyone who can be in contention at Milan-San Remo, ride Mathieu van der Poel off their wheel on the Paterberg in Tour of Flanders, win both cobbled and Ardennes Classics, beat the likes of Wout van Aert and Primož Roglič in a time trial, and out-climb all but…
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