“Everything must change for everything to remain the same” is one of the most famous quotations in Italian literature. The paradoxical statement comes from The Leopard novel, with 19th-century Sicilian society as its subject matter but it is a good description of a 21st-century bike racing too.
Each edition of Milan-San Remo has a seemingly endless number of potential outcomes but the ingredients that go into producing them remain virtually identical. Professional bike racing is constantly changing but the outcome of the races is the same.
No matter the protagonists in any given year, we take it for granted that each edition of La Primavera will be run over an almost absurdly long distance between the capital of northern Italy and the coastal resort of San Remo.
And it’s equally hard to imagine anything other than the race’s symbolic switch from winter to spring as it crosses the Passo Turchino, followed by the series of short, coastal ‘capi’ climbs before the Cipressa and the Poggio and then the usual climactic switchback descent to San Remo’s Via Roma finish.
It’s symptomatic of Milan-San Remo’s ferocious attachment to its own past that its unprecedented start this year in Abbiategrasso, a town a few dozen kilometres further west of Milan, has sparked so much comment.
Speculation on the potential for change to the outcome was even more intense, of course, when the route of the 2020 edition was changed considerably because of its pandemic-induced shift in dates to the summer.
That’s equally true on the rare occasions when the Turchino has been substituted because of landslides, or when building work in San Remo meant the Via Roma finish was moved elsewhere. By comparison, Il Lombardia, Italy’s other Monument, constantly (and deliberately) changes its start and finish towns each year and mixes the route up again and again, and nobody bats an eyelid.
Yet for all that familiarity of format, Milan-San Remo is always cited as the least formulaic of the Classics, the hardest to read and so to win, and the one with the least certain outcome.
“The thing that always strikes me about Milan-San Remo is that it is never over, it’s the race of infinite possibilities,” Elia Viviani tells Cyclingnews.
“It’s the race that’s always open to change, in that way it’s like a dream. It’s the first big Classic of the season, too. And the first is always the most important of all.”
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