Another race, another Tadej Pogačar exhibition. You can pretty much write the script these days: a long-range solo attack (Il Lombardia was only treated to a 48km move), and a winning margin as big as it was preposterous (three minutes and 16 seconds to Remco Evenepoel in second). Same old, same old. The slayer, destroyer, and conqueror did what was so predictable that L’Equipe rated him as a five star pre-race favourite and left the four and three star options blank, such is the chasm between the world champion and the rest.
Yet if you wind the clock back an hour before his inevitable explosive attack, Lombardia had a different process en-route to the same outcome. Such is Pogačar’s dominance – scratch that, for it’s not even dominance anymore, it’s his sport and he’s just letting others partake for the pretty pictures, ‘cos Tadej’s nice like that – that all other teams en masse realised at the season’s latest possible juncture that they have to think outside the box and be proactive as opposed to reactive. Instead of the usual five- or six-man break, what went clear was a mammoth breakaway of 22 riders, the sort you only really see in the dying embers of a Grand Tour when several teams are fearing the wrath of their sponsors for not delivering more than a few seconds of TV coverage.
What separated it from those desperate composite breaks, however, was the personnel and teams involved: Bahrain, not so Victorious this year, were represented by their three big hitters: Matej Mohorič, Antonio Tiberi and Damiano Caruso; a Tom Pidcock-less Ineos Grenadiers counted Thymen Arensman and Brandon Rivera; Visma-Lease a Bike, upstaged all season by UAE Team Emirates, had Wilco Kelderman and Tiesj Benoot; and Eddie Dunbar (Jayco-AlUla) and Dani Martínez (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe), both off the back of Grand Tour successes, were also present. Three other teams had double representation, and only four WorldTour teams were missing: Arkea-B&B Hotels, Cofidis, EF Education-EasyPost and Intermarché-Wanty.
The responsibility to bring them back, then, laid squarely at the front wheels of UAE Team Emirates. They could expect a bit of help from EF, but no-one else was going to assist them. True, this wasn’t new: UAE assume the position as race leaders pretty much every single race, but here was a new conundrum for them: how do you stop a powerful group of almost two dozen from building an unassailable lead? And if you do that…