Shortly after the start of each Milan-San Remo fans will glance at the race profile and remember there’s well over 250km of Italian tarmac for the riders to cover. Save for the gentle Passo Del Truchino, the opening two thirds are traditionally flat and this makes the race differ from the other four, more challenging,
Tag: Alexander Kristoff
It’s the end of February and we can all start looking forward to Cancellara-solo attacks, Ian Stannard defying the odds, punctures, falls, mud, velodromes and lots and lots of Etixx Quick-Step.
The number of cycling races organized seems to grow each year. Alongside the UCI World Tour there are the tours of Europe, Asia, Africa and America and the growth of the sport has gone hand in hand with increased popularity and media attention. The inauguration of new races has been highly successful but some older,
With a list of winners including Tom Boonen, Paolo Bettini, Cadel Evans, Mark Cavendish and Rui Costa, the World Championship Road Race is successful at sharing out the title of the ‘World’s Best’ across a number of different rider types. In very few other one day races could Vincenzo Nibali and Elia Viviani be considered
Alexander Kristoff won the Tour of Flanders last weekend making it no Belgian winners for three years – the longest wait for the home nation since Fiorenzo Magni’s hatrick in the 1950s. But this race was just the latest in a series of fantastic Kristoff performances confirming just how good he is as a classics rider.
Tomorrow morning 238 riders will start the 99th Tour of Flanders, or Ronde Van Vlaanderen to give the race its proper, untranslated name. The race is the second Monument of the year and the first on the cobbles of Belgium. Unlike Paris-Roubaix the cobbles and race length provide only half the challenge with hilly sections also
At 293km, Milan-San Remo is the longest of the five Monuments and is sometimes referred to as a ‘Sprinters Classic’. This year the recent trend of sprint wins continued with Giant-Alpecin’s John Degenkolb delivering from a reduced bunch. The German endured the climbs well and played the waiting game well into the final kilometre. Last year’s
With March comes two of the first big UCI Stage Races of the Year; Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. Though the former has history and prestige, Tirreno-Adriatico’s route across Italy attracted a host of the best climbers. The ‘Race of the Two Seas’ started and ended with a time trial and contained a Queen Stage that ended