Like grunge music and beat poetry, Milan-San Remo is seemingly easy to ride but exceedingly difficult to master. The opening Monument of the year offers a challenge quite unlike any other in cycling: the obvious obstacles are hardly insurmountable yet the pitfalls are constant. The white knuckle drama of the final 20 kilometres lends to the perception that La Primavera is a straightforward shoot-out between attackers and sprinters, but such a description does scant justice to the subtlety of the race. Ahead of this weekend's latest installment, Cyclingnews looks back at ten different ways in which the race has been won over the years.
Solo clear on the Turchino – Fausto Coppi 1946
It's not easy to pinpoint precisely when and where Fausto Coppi transfigured into the quasi-mystical figure he is recalled as today, but the Turchino pass at the 1946 Milan-San Remo seems as likely a place as any. By that point, Milan-San Remo's late March date had already established it as La Primavera, the race that heralded the end of winter and the coming of spring, and the Turchino was the landmark of this liminality. Before the climb, the riders rolled their way through the frigid air of the northern Italian plain for one hundred miles. After cresting the summit, they dropped towards the glistening Riviera and the promise of spring.
The 1946 edition of Milan-San Remo was also the first after World War II and the bitter civil war that had followed the collapse of Fascism in Italy, and that background only added to the symbolism of the race and its passage over the Turchino. Coppi was part of a five-man group that broke clear early on, and once on the slopes of the Turchino, he seemed to climb into another realm. The Frenchman Lucien Teisseire was the last man to stay in contact but he was inexorably distanced and Coppi emerged alone from the tunnel before the summit.
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Over the 145 kilometres that remained, Coppi would build up a lead of 14 minutes to win alone in San Remo and the newspaper reports the following day couldn't help but position the exploit within the wider context of Italy's recent – and ongoing – unrest. "Coppi's feat would simply have given a new lustre to a splendid athletic event, had another factor not conferred an undeniable symbolic meaning upon it," Bruno Roghi wrote in Gazzetta dello Sport. "Because of Coppi's exploit, we feel unrepentantly Italian, Italians once again."
Follow orders to the letter – Raymond Poulidor 1961
As a rider, Antonin Magne won two Tours de France and a world title in the 1930s, but it is his afterlife as a directeur sportif that tends to recur most frequently in French cycling folklore. Magne's eccentricities added much colour to the careers of Louison Bobet and Raymond Poulidor – he always wore a black beret and white shirt, and insisted on addressing his riders with the formal vous – while he also had a laconic command of language. As Jacques Anquetil prepared to catch and pass Poulidor in a time trial at the 1962 Tour, for instance, Magne is reputed to have pithily instructed his rider: "Pull over, Raymond, and admire the Caravelle [the precursor to the Concorde – ed.]"
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