A hotel on the outskirts of Milan, on the eve of the Sanremo Festival. The press conference had just finished. UAE Team Emirates and we had a chat in the square with Andrea Agostini, whose qualification in the team is Chief Operating Officer. There were jokes that Pogacar wanted to win a little too much and he, who has experienced various sporting events first-hand, said a sentence that we stopped to reflect on for a while in recent days.
“It’s good that he wins whenever he can,” said Andrea, “because it doesn't last foreverYou can be Merckx too, but the moment when things stop working comes for everyone».
Collective suggestion
We were all in the grip of the biggest cycling drunkenness of recent timesPogacar had been so powerful at Tirreno that In the press room on the last day, the Slovenian's victory at Sanremo was taken for grantedThe doubt was only about how he would do it, not about the merits. Instead, Classicissima, while still forcing the Cipressa anticipated by Bartoli by bike.PRO, Pogacar made several mistakes due to inexperience.
All those shots on the Poggio, instead of a single and winning one, they showed that certain races need to be done and then done again before finding the key. And if it cannot be ruled out that Tadej could return to win on Via Roma, after what was seen yesterday, It is highly possible that the same thing could happen to him in Flanders.The boy is intelligent and very strong, we are sure that he is chewing on the disappointment and reanalyzing the stepsLet's try to help him then...
The longest sprint
He made a mistake, if we can actually call it a mistake, in the sprint. The straight, longer than a kilometre, betrayed him.The sprint seems endless through the screens, let alone being inside them. You see the finish line, it seems close and yet it's so far away and if by chance it occurs to you to slow down to expose your opponent, you have to take into account that they could come back from behindIt happened yesterday.
Pogacar does not have the sprinting experience of Van der Poel and Mathieu played a great game yesterday, chasing away like a champion the ghosts of 2021.
Pogacar in a trap
From the left he moved to the opposite side, leaving the door open on the right side however. A meter between himself and the thirty-year-olds. When Van Baarle and Madouas reached them, Van der Poel realised that Madouas was about to come in from that side and that Van Baarle would instead try to get past him on the left..
As soon as he sensed Madouas' presence, he accelerated, deftly closing the door on the right with a 40 centimeter shift. He certainly realized that Van Baarle would follow him at that point, trapping Pogacar.
It's hard to say whether he did all this knowingly, but At worst it was just a sprinter's instinct.. In any case, the operation worked great. A sign of clarity and fresher energy than that which forced him to surrender to Asgreen in 2021.
Tadej's mistake
If anything, Pogacar might have made a mistake on the Paterberg, when he realized, having turned around, that Van der Poel was hanging by a thread, having seen him coughing and also spittingThe fact that he didn't want to or wasn't able to detach him up there somehow sealed his fate in the sprint.
On the other hand, he had to face an unexpected Van der Poel. The phenomenon we have come to know over the past two seasons was simply not there yesterday.Mathieu, with blood in his eyes to prove he is the strongest – the more spectacular, the better – stepped aside at Flanders. Maybe yesterday he knew he didn't have the best legs or maybe, even though he had them, he chose not to overdo it.
Certainly his lucidity has turned the clock back a year, to that 4th April 2021 when he was the one playing the part of Pogacar and behind him Asgreen was spitting out effort and tears just to not be detachedEveryone remembers how it ended, and that wound remained on Van der Poel's skin for a whole year and perhaps will remain there forever. But he learned. That doesn't mean he didn't have the legs to relieve Pogacar on the Kwaremont or the Paterberg. Maybe he simply chose not to. The 2021 Van der Poel wanted to prove he was the strongest. The 2022 one wanted to win..
