Hindsight is always easy, of course, but Filippo Ganna didn’t quite know how to process his second-place finish at Milan-San Remo against the most elite opposition imaginable. As ever, this race of almost 300km was ultimately distilled to a sequence of split-second decisions.
“Angry or satisfied? I’m still a bit in limbo,” Ganna said when asked to put words on his feelings in the mixed zone. “We haven’t analysed it yet.”
The Ineos Grenadiers racer looked to have done the hardest part by resisting Tadej Pogacar’s anticipated onslaught on the Poggio, only for Mathieu van der Poel to sprint clear of the four-man front group just as the gradient eased near the summit.
The Ineos rider had locked himself confidently to Pogacar’s wheel on the steepest ramps, but now he hesitated as Van der Poel surged clear. Ganna preferred to leave the business of closing the gap to the Slovenian or to Wout van Aert. Neither man could, and the moment was gone.
Van der Poel swooped into the descent clutching a slender lead, but he eked out that advantage by sprinting out of every hairpin bend on the drop into San Remo. He would reach the Via Roma with a buffer of 15 seconds, while Ganna overpowered Van Aert and Pogacar to take second place.
“With the head I wanted to follow, but with the legs, I didn’t know if I was ready or not,” Ganna said of his response to Van der Poel’s race-winning attack. “I preferred not to follow and maybe to see what happened on the downhill or the flat. Maybe if I had a magic 8 ball to look inside… Maybe next time I’ll try to follow.”
The hesitation seemed even more understandable when it emerged that Van der Poel’s time up the Poggio – unofficially clocked by La Gazzetta dello Sport at 5:38 – was a new record, beating the mark of 5:46 set by Giorgio Furlan in 1994. “If I can come back and rewind, I could have tried,” Ganna said.
Mindful of his limitations as a descender, Ganna preferred to leave the pace-making to Van Aert on the drop into San Remo, and on occasion, the Italian even risked losing the wheel in front of him. By the time the road flattened out inside the final 2km, it already seemed clear that only a late mishap could deny Van der Poel the third Monument victory of his career.
Beforehand, Ganna had hoped to reach that point in the front group and then look to replicate Fabian Cancellara’s race-winning effort of 2008. “If we arrived in a little group after the downhill, the idea was to attack a bit like…
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