Italy isn’t just great for pasta and coffee. Despite a packed early-season calendar, Tirreno-Adriatico still offers the best path to peak form for Milan-San Remo and the cobbled Classics.
The weather is generally better than Paris-Nice, which was struck by disastrous conditions again this year, conditions that Classics riders consider too great a risk. The racing at Tirreno-Adriatico is typically less intense, allowing the one-day specialists a gentler on-ramp to peak form. So when it comes to searching for hints about how Milan-San Remo might go, Tirreno is the place to look.
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While every other four or five-star contender for La Classicissima was in Italy for the seven stages of Tirreno-Adriatico, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) stayed at home to follow his unique Spring Classics plan that stretches across the next six weekends, culminating in Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
Unlike previous years, this season Van Aert ripped up the Visma-Lease a Bike training manual and insisted on riding Tirreno-Adriatico this year rather than a block of March altitude training, and seemed pleased with the results.
“You can’t simulate this work in training,” he said after a week of suffering ended with a smile and good legs.
“Even with a good training schedule, you always choose a certain comfort zone. Here, the pace is set by someone else; you have…
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