THE ZOOMERS ARE HERE
Young riders performed ahead of schedule in 2019. Egan Bernal won the Tour de France at 22, Tadej Pogacar came third in the Vuelta at 20 and Remco Evenepoel won Clásica San Sebastián at 19. That’s one-nine. There was no steady development into contenders while the old generation gently slipped out of view – riders like Tom Dumoulin and Primož Roglic, who are just entering what should be their peak years – are only at one grand tour win each, and they are already looking over their shoulders.
Even the much-vaunted generation of 1990, a cohort of (once) young and successful riders including Peter Sagan, Nairo Quintana, Michael Matthews, Thibaut Pinot, Rohan Dennis, Romain Bardet, Michał Kwiatkowski, Dumoulin himself and Esteban Chaves, will turn 30 this year. They have plenty of wins left in them, but they must be alarmed at how fast the next generation have established themselves in winning big races.
Bernal will start his third Tour in July as the defending champion and the big favourite, though there are fewer of the very high altitude climbs that favour him on the 2020 route. The cycling world is licking its lips in anticipation of Pogacar also making his debut there. Evenepoel will hit the classics and one-week stage races hard this year and the Belgian has made noises about wanting to develop into a Tour contender, too. And Pavel Sivakov,
Sergio Higuita, Jasper Philipsen and Ivan Sosa, all riders born in 1997 or later, will be another year more experienced and stronger. And even these riders are comparatively aged compared to the WorldTour’s youngest rider in 2020 – 18-year-old Quinn Simmons, the world junior champion who has signed for Trek-Segafredo. Nobody expects Simmons to win races at 18 or 19, but neither did we expect that of Evenepoel and he took victory in one of the hardest WorldTour one-day races.
The success has a galvanising and inspiring effect too - riders who might have been intimidated by the challenge see other young riders doing well and ask, ‘Why not?’ Call them what you will - Generation Z, the post-millennials, the Zoomers – but they are in the
process of taking over cycling.
They say of Milan-San Remo that it’s the easiest classic to finish and the hardest one to win. Just ask Philippe Gilbert.
The Belgian rider stands on the brink of greatness. If he can win, he’ll become the fourth rider in history and the first since the late 1970s to win all five monuments. The breadth of talent needed to win all five races was already vanishingly rare in the 1960s and 1970s. To win all five in the specialised modern era would be a staggering feat.
Gilbert’s monument career has been through three distinct eras. From his debut in 2003 through to 2007, he wasn’t winning any. However, in 2008 he started to pick up bigger wins – he took both Omloop Het Volk and Paris-Tours that year, and was third in Milan-San Remo, and he developed into a dominant hilly classics specialist. Between 2009 and 2012 he won Lombardia twice, plus Liège and the Worlds. Through to 2016, he was still mainly focusing on the hilly one-day races, only with a lot less success.
But by 2017 he had decided to reawaken his latent cobbled classics ambitions. He took advantage of teamwork and a long break to win Flanders that year, then went back to Paris-Roubaix, which he’d only ridden once before taking two goes to win it by last year.
And now, only San Remo awaits. On the positive side, it was the first monument he looked close to winning – he was third in 2008 and 2011. But the win has eluded him, and in 15 attempts, he’s more often than not finished outside the top 10, and he hasn’t finished in the front group since 2014. Furthermore, at 37, he’s fast running out of years and in order to secure Flanders and Roubaix, he’s sacrificed the devastating uphill acceleration of his peak years for more solid endurance. Given that the entire cycling world, including his rivals, will be waiting for an attack on the Poggio, it’s almost inconceivable that he could succeed in getting away there. The alternatives are an earlier attack, though nobody has won from the Cipressa since Gabriele Colombo in 1996, something later, like the one which won Fabian Cancellara the race in 2008, or an unusual mid-race split, like the one which defined the 2011 race.
In 2020, Gilbert has returned to the Lotto team for which he won his first three monuments – Lombardia twice and Liège. If he can win just one more for them, no other result this season will match it for significance.
If Gilbert can win San Remo, he’ll become the fourth rider to win all five monuments