Pogacar aims for the Milano-Sanremo: the duty to win and the pleasure of surprising

In a year Tadej Pogacar he has changed his approach, but not his attitude. At the Milan-San Remo on Saturday 18 March he comes as a favourite, as more or less always happens, in every race, since the end of 2020, you add the adverb: largely, widely, enormously. With the same lightness and breadth he has lined up 7 victories in 13 days of competition. Since he set foot in the 2023 season, his fifth as a professional, he has percentages as a thoroughbred striker, not as a runner. Seven victories plus the two general classifications of Ruta del Sol and Paris-Nice (what the French call the Race towards the sun, the yellow star like his most loved jersey returns). Then there is the “how”. Dominating and playing with opponents. Whether they were called Turner, Landa, Mas, Gaudu, Vingegaard. Minutes ahead, attacks from very far away or on the last climb, or even just short flights. “When you feel good, the best defense is attack,” he said in Nice. They even criticized him: he exaggerates, they say. But he seems to stroll: “I’m relaxed by nature, I’m like this every day.”

The pleasure of winning

Winning always, for Pogacar, is neither an obsession nor a duty, but a pleasure, and the goal is almost always wonder. Winning isn’t the only thing that matters, but counting them now seems like a lot. 55, at 24, an avalanche. And weighing them, they weigh a lot: two Tours, two Lombardias, one Liège, one Strade Bianche. Of the 8 classic monument races in his career, he has won 3 and has never been worse than 18th, at the first, Liege 2019. He runs smiling, with a tuft sticking out under his helmet. The defeat at the 2022 Tour, when it took all the Jumbo’s firepower to knock him out, seems to have helped him. Now he runs, freed from the task of perfection. He runs for pleasure, as he learned as a child to ride around Comenda, his Slovenian town, about a hundred km from Gorizia. For Tadej everything seems simple, elementary.

The four shots on the Poggio in 2022

Pogi arrives at Sanremo with a higher turnover than a year ago, when he collected 5 successes of the day. In 2022 he was carried away by enthusiasm and attacked four times on the Poggio: they always went under him, until finally, the compatriot Matej Mohoric he didn’t invent the descent of life and went on to win by exploiting a technical novelty, the telescopic seat post. Pogacar finished 5th, and then was 4th at Flanders, after dominating it with Van der Poel. He will repeat the experiment, interspersing it with E3 and Dwars. Then the Ardennes, without Roubaix, before the fourth assault on the Tour. Smiling, always, whether he wins or loses.