Poggio
After 185 miles and six and a half hours of pedaling, Tadej Pogačar held his sprint, extended his arms in full flexion, and pushed the bike beneath him for a photo finish with English cycling phenom Tom Pidcock. The result was decided by half a wheel’s length. Though less certain than races that play more directly to Pogačar’s many strengths, the outcome itself was not unexpected. The margin and how it unfolded were anything but.
After a crash at the base of the Cipressa, the first of the two crucial climbs of Milan–San Remo, roughly twenty miles from the finish, Pogačar remounted in a sea of bodies and twisted frames, his white skinsuit torn along the left side, reddened from now missing skin. He powered his way back to the peloton and, with the assistance of his formidable team, moved through the bunch beneath the ancient buildings lining the Ligurian coast. By the lower slopes of the climb, he was at the front, seemingly unfazed, if anything invigorated by the incident, attacking to distance himself from the peloton as he neared the top.
Pidcock and the Dutch rider Mathieu van der Poel, another multidiscipline superstar, followed, forming a decisive break. All three, exceptional descenders, pushed the limits of the Cipressa, then rotated smoothly across the flat before the Poggio, the race’s final arbiter.
At its base, van der Poel, 2025 Milan-San Remo winner, heavier and more explosive, and who had been wearing a visible grimace for the better half of the break, was distanced, unable to follow as Pogačar and Pidcock crested and descended toward the finish. Behind, the peloton surged, absorbing van der Poel like a crashing wave. Ahead, Pidcock waited behind Pogačar’s wheel, baiting him to go first.
Inside the final 300 meters, Pogačar launched. Pidcock followed, drafting, then slingshotting past at the line in a near-perfect bike throw.
It was not enough. By centimeters, Pogačar held on.
They placed arms around each other as they rolled to a stop. Pogačar was met first by the embrace of his partner and fellow professional cyclist, Urška Žigart, then by media and a swelling UAE Team Emirates entourage, which included guests Carlos Sainz and his girlfriend, Rebecca Donaldson. He had done it, winning the longest race in modern cycling and leaving just one Monument unconquered.
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Cycling is an extraordinarily beautiful and multilayered sport, a case study on and metaphor for the human experience shaped by technology and politics, set against the natural world and unfolding within the built environment. Like much of sport, results can be decided by imperceptible margins. What distinguishes cycling is where and how those margins are realized: not in isolation, but across public roads, through towns and cities, amidst fans, and under the full influence of the elements.
It is defined, too, by duration and exposure. Hours of sustained effort accumulate into something more naturally intelligible as suffering than performance. Risk is constant. The body is managed with precision, balanced on the limits of power that thinness will allow. Counterintuitively, it is also a team sport, one in which the efforts of the domestique are requisite to the celebration of the leader, where individual triumph is cruelly constructed through the sacrifice of others.
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Pogačar’s generational talent is beyond dispute. His trajectory toward being the greatest ever continues. His persona has evolved with his stardom but remains disarmingly transparent. He is still boyish, still lovably inarticulate, still in possession of eyes that read indistinctly between detachment and unwavering focus. Jet fuel still flows through his arteries in place of blood. He is the concentrated embodiment of a bike racer. A new hairstyle and a hint of bravado, likely shaped by UAE’s expansive infrastructure, matter less than his chemistry with Žigart and, more importantly, the way he races his bike.
Pidcock, by contrast, beyond his palmarès, has been defined of late by self-belief. His move from Ineos Grenadiers to Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team a rejection of support roles and declaration of intent for the General Classification of Grand Tours. What read to many as arrogance has swapped quickly with perception. In March of 2026, he was in form, validated by his win at Milano–Torino, and at Milan–San Remo, Pogačar could not drop him.
And yet, even at this level, it was not enough.
Cycling invites a constellation of interpretations. The same result can signal emergence or inevitability, promise or confirmation. Whether this moment represents the rise of a rival or the reinforcement of dominance depends on one’s vantage, of which there are infinite.
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Any great performance requires more than a singular protagonist. Its depth depends on the strength of the cast. Professional cycling’s current era is exceptional.
Van der Poel was there when it mattered, shaping the race before being dropped; a reminder that even the greatest can be distanced. Wout van Aert continues to defy categorization. As one example of his many distinctions, at the Tour de France in 2021, he won a sprint, a summit finish, and a time trial, disciplines that may as well be considered separate sports entirely. At Milan–San Remo, after crashing, he rode alone to third behind Pogačar and Pidcock, turning his own race into a time trial against the peloton.
The field beyond carries its own weight. Jasper Stuyven, composed and experienced as another former Milan–San Remo winner. Filippo Ganna, a remarkably versatile pure expression of power; later rewarded at Dwars door Vlaanderen with his first one-day race win despite multiple Olympic gold medals and Grand Tour time trial victories. Biniam Girmay, expanding the sport culturally and competitively; the first Black rider to win the points classification, the Green Jersey, at the Tour de France.
What elevates this sport is not just who wins, but who is left behind.
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Professional cycling is accelerating. It is faster, more aggressive, less forgiving. Technology has pushed the bicycle and the body that powers it to new limits—lighter, stiffer, more aerodynamic, new paradigms of power transfer and training science. Nutrition is calibrated, recovery optimized, data omnipresent. Margins continue to compress. With more money comes higher expectation, deeper infrastructure, and a new standard of professionalism. Just as significant is the cultural shift. Old rhythms—measured pacing, selective aggression—have given way to a new relentlessness. Every race is ridden as though it’s the last. Nothing is assumed.
In that context, Milan–San Remo remains a paradox. The longest race in modern cycling, it demands patience before delivering violence. Hours of slow accumulation—its particular drudgery—stretch across flat coastal roads before the instantaneous shock of the Cipressa and the excessiveness of the Poggio. For some, this structure is maddening. For others, it is the point.
And, like the rest of road racing, it unfolds in shared space, through a lattice of villages, along coastline, exposed to the elements. The sea sits to one side, vast and indifferent. The crowd presses in from the other, close enough to feel, even to reach out and touch, the consequence.
In 2026, professional cycling is both timeless and distinctly of this moment.
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If there is a reason to watch cycling now, it is for how it exists in our world. Few sports hold so many tensions at once: effort and environment, control and chance, individual ambition and collective sacrifice. It is beautiful in its brutality, precise and fragile. No other sport renders its own contradictions so completely.
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Six days later, on a descent during the Volta a Catalunya, Pidcock went off the road at nearly 40 miles per hour. Out of sight, he radioed for help. His injuries were extensive: bone trauma, ligament damage, swelling. An entire system disrupted in an instant.
At peak form, this is not unusual. Speed invites risk. Confidence narrows margins. Through his social media and statements to the press, Pidcock met it with clarity: accidents are part of the sport.
His timeline for recovery raises questions. It also reinforces Pogačar’s position; his momentum, for now, undisturbed, while reminding us that he, too, rides within the same conditions.
Two weeks later, Pogačar won the Tour of Flanders.
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The American writer Donald Antrim is a passionate cyclist. His review of Tim Krabbé’s Dutch cycling cult classic novella, The Rider, a first-person psychological account of a single French bike race, speaks to the sport’s power and place within the hearts, minds, and collective existence of those who consume it:
“Krabbé’s half-day race … shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, relational, fast, slow, dangerous, consuming, prone to mechanical failure, heroic, futile. But to say that the race is the metaphor for life is to miss the point. The race obliterates whatever isn’t racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.”
The sport of professional cycling is uniquely legible. At its core is a tool most of us have known intimately, the bicycle; something that has carried us through leisure and play, and for many, necessity and work; a tool for experience and participation in the world, whatever place we find ourselves in it. The same mechanics underpin the highest levels of the sport. We understand them, at least in part, because we have felt them ourselves.
Written by Chessin Gertler | Photography by Chessin Gertler