Strade Bianche is ancient and avant-garde, a cycling paradox

It is strange, almost a paradox, that the cycle race that runs, at least in part, on the oldest and most primitive road surface, the dirt road, is the most recent and, in many ways, avant-garde race of the entire Italian cycling panorama, and perhaps not just Italian. The Strade Bianche is a young race considering the more than 100-year-old history of cycling competitions: it is not yet of age. It was created sixteen and a half years ago, on 9 October 2007, the seventeenth edition will be staged on Saturday 4 March.

Strade Bianche is a young race that was born old, or rather ancient, because it is ancient memory to pedal where there is no asphalt, there never was. The Strade Bianche was born from an offshoot of the Eroica, with the ciclostorica it shared the start, Gaiole in Chianti, the father, Giancarlo Brocci, the jump into a cycling that no longer exists, of which it is also difficult to remember now.

It could not fail to like it, she liked it immediately. To such an extent that it is now one of the most important events of the season. To such an extent that he can be disinterested in dealing with those present and absent at the start.

This year there will be no Tadej Pogacar and Wout van Aert among the men, Marta Cavalli and Elisa Longo Borghini among the women. However, these are minor details. Absences are always minor details for all big one-day races. Because if the cliché that the runners make the race is true, certain races are exceptional regardless of the runners and indeed it is they who enrich the runners’ career. He explained it Fabian Cancellara – the Swiss is the only one to have won three editions of the race – in 2019: “Those who continue to make comparisons with the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix more than ten years after the first edition of the Strade Bianche have not understood one thing instead it is evident to all the runners: the Sienese dirt roads shine with their own light, they are something different from the pavé, they have an equal and at the same time different charm. They have become a world, no longer just part of a race”.
The comparisons don’t hold up, the pavé has nothing to do with the dirt road. Although they derive from the same concept of cycling, the mineral one, of not giving a damn about the discomfort. Pavé and earthworks are the territory of a pedal conquest, the demonstration that there is nothing that can stop the bicycle.

Strade Bianche also has another point in common with Roubaix. They are the only two rides clearly visible from a distance, even by those people who are not interested in cycling at all. At least when the weather is good. They appear on the horizon, heralded by a cloud of dust. And when you see that cloud of dust, you know that there, right there under the blanket, there are dozens and dozens of runners intent on battling it out to win a race that alone settles the accounts of a season. Sometimes an entire career. Certainly the Strade Bianche still has earthworks to pedal, the Roubaix is ​​a classic monument, one of the four most important one-day races. Strade Bianche no, it’s not and it’s not right that it should become one, but it approaches it for imagination and consideration: there are many, many, the enormous majority, the riders who consider it one of those races around which to build a season.

It helps a little, to tell the truth, the fact that it is the first major race on the calendar (there would also be the Omloop Het Nieuwsblat to precede it, but the stones of Flanders, if they are not those of the Ronde, at least in Italy they are seen with a little too much sufficiency).

It is first, it is above all avant-garde. At least in Italy, and not only in Italy. Because it’s the only major online race organized in our country that also has a female version. A doubling of the beauty of cycling, and not one more organizational annoyance. Milano-Sanremo and Giro di Lombardia still don’t have a women’s race, by now the only ones among the great classics of European cycling.

The women’s Strade Bianche already has the best female cyclists who have cycled in recent years in its roll of honour: from Elisa Longo Borghini to Anna van der Breggen, from Annemiek van Vleuten to Chantal Blaak, up to Lotte Kopecky, a year ago. Kopecky and van Vleuten have already said they will be at the start to win because Strade Bianche is one of those races that you’ve wanted to run since the beginning of the year. They both said it, almost in the same words.