A CRASH DASHED WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EPIC YEAR IN PRO CYCLING
With four of the Big Six out of action, is this year's season boring?
Professional cycling’s Spring Season of racing across the narrow roads and cold and wet climes of northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands concluded on Sunday. Tadej Pogačar proved once again that he could dominate a race at time and place of his choosing when he launched an attack on one of the last steep, hard climbs, to win one of cycling’s oldest races, Liège–Bastogne–Liège.
The 254-kilometer race includes more than 14,000 feet of climbing. When Pogačar accelerated, he dropped some of the best riders in the world. One rider gave chase for a minute, but he quickly realized everyone would be racing for second and third place.
In the end, Pogačar outpaced and outdistanced the second place finisher by one minute and 39 seconds—the widest margin of victory in 44 years—according to Spencer Martin of Beyond the Peloton. It’s his second time winning LBL.
Like Babe Ruth pointing the bat towards the outfield and beyond, and then smacking a home run outside of the ball park, Pogačar signaled how he would win, and he did just as he said.
While such acts of greatness are fun and humbling to watch, what makes sport great is the drama of rivalries. Right now, due to two major early season crashes, cycling is missing those rivalries because four of cycling’s “Big Six” elite riders are out of the action for many weeks, if not months.
All of which is to ask…has cycling become a bit boring?
In early April, at the Tour of the Basque Country stage race, a dozen leading group of riders, including three of the world’s best cyclists, careened into a harrowing curve at an extraordinary level of speed.
As a rider at the front of the pack lost his front wheel, the riders in front and behind him either slammed into a drainage ditch on the side of the road or crashed trying to avoid it as well as the boulders and trees littering the roadside.
Three of cycling’s Big Six1 sustained devastating injuries as a result of the crash.
Jonas Vinegaard, the 2022 and 2023 Tour de France champion, spent 12 days in the hospital with severe injuries to his heart and lungs (Visma Lease a Bike’s lack of transparency about his injuries was ridiculous).
Remco Evenepoel, the 2022 World Champion, broke his collarbone.
Primoz Roglic, winner of last year’s Giro d’Italia, walked away with severe road rash. Another rider, Jay Vine, will be in a neck brace for many weeks and narrowly avoided spinal surgery.
In late March, at a one-day tune-up race for the Tour de Flanders, Wout van Aert, one of the best stage hunters in the Grand Tours and one-day racers, crashed in a freak accident and broke his sternum, collarbone, and ribs.
Watching the race on MAX, viewers could hear Van Aert wailing in pain having hit the ground so hard and perhaps knowing his ambition of winning the Giro d’Italia, several Spring Classics2, and an Olympic Gold Medal would not materialize this year.
All four riders might return to racing later in the season, but even if they can it is unlikely that they can return in top form. Their dreams of victories are on hold for now.
With four of the Big Six missing in action, Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel have dominated the early season racing.
For the second year in a row, van der Poel won Paris-Roubaix, perhaps the most iconic race of the Spring Classics because of its 29 sections of ancient cobblestone roads. He attacked with 60 kilometers to go and won the race in record time. As everyone else seemed to suffer and finish the race with bloodied and blistered hands, van der Poel looked like he was out for an easy Sunday ride with much slower friends.
A week earlier, van der Poel became just the third man to win a record three Tour of Flanders and only the tenth rider to win the Tour of Flanders and Roubaix in the same season, according to Reuters.
Pogačar, van der Poel, and Evenepoel have won 12 of the past 16 Monuments, according to Martin.
Pogačar will no doubt be in top form when the Giro d’Italia begins in May and, assuming he will dominate in the steepest mountains and on stages that demand some cagey racing, he’s likely to cross the finish line in the winner’s pink jersey.
At the Tour de France, Vingegaard likely will be absent and it’s hard to imagine who can challenge Pogačar. So much can go wrong in cycling, but it is hard to see how the 25-year-old Slovenian doesn’t win two Grand Tours this year.
There is no question that it is fun to watch Pogačar and van der Poel race. It is exciting to watch the moment when both men decide to launch what will become the winning move in a race.
At the same time, that dominance comes with a price. It’s like a story that ends too soon. Without any real competition, the races become a bit anticlimatic.
They just are not as much fun to watch or, honestly, write and read about.
One final point. There’s often a complaint in professional cycling that the best riders never go head-to-head because there are so many, perhaps too many, races on the calendar. The number of races dilutes the competition making the sport less exciting than it otherwise might be.
But three of the Big Six were competing at the Basque Country, which is exactly what made the race exciting to watch. That excitement, too, came with a cost. When one went down, they all went down. This just underscores that cycling is a cruel, cruel sport for fans and the professional cyclists themselves.
While there still are plenty of good stories to tell about the 2024 season, waiting for the Big Six to go head-to-head will, sadly, have to wait.
The Big Six are Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel, Primož Roglič, and Remco Evenepoel.
The cycling calendar has five Monuments: Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and the Giro di Lombardia.