Beautiful victory for Mollema in Lombardia
A Bauke Mollema attack is not a thing of beauty. It’s a slow windingup of pace, in which every available muscle is recruited in the service of forward motion: legs, arms, back, shoulders, neck. The Dutchman is a grinder, a turner of big gears, a study in asymmetric pedalling and sticky-out elbows, who puts so much effort into yanking his pedals around that he cannot spare any to hide the grimace on his face. It is said that riders like to let their legs do the talking; in Mollema’s case his legs articulate more of a boorish hollering.
He’s effective, though. Mollema’s modus operandi is well known enough now that the attack he made on the Civiglio, the penultimate climb of Il Lombardia, should have rung loud alarm bells among the dozen or so riders left in the leading group. His biggest wins up to that point had been the Clásica San Sebastián in 2016 (a solo attack in the final kilometres, in which he held off a strong chasing group) and a Tour de France stage in the Massif Central in 2017 (a solo attack in the final kilometres in which he held off a strong chasing group).
A couple of riders in that Civiglio group should have known better than to let him go. Alejandro Valverde had been third behind Mollema in San Sebastián. Primož Roglic came fourth on the Tour de France stage win. The Slovene and the Spaniard, recently first and second in the Vuelta, watched Mollema depart and unwisely did nothing. The only rider to belatedly go after Mollema on the climb, Pierre Latour, was chased down on four separate occasions; all this
achieved was to disrupt the group’s momentum. Roglic tried to chase Mollema after the descent, but by this point the Dutchman was clear. It was another solo attack in the final kilometres in which he held off a strong chasing group.
Before Mollema upset the form book, the race had been a bit of a sneak preview of next summer’s Tour. The pre-race form guides had centred around two riders: Ineos’s Egan Bernal, who had ridden a form-building crescendo of Italian one-day races in the run-up to Lombardia, culminating in a Gran Piemonte win, and Roglic, who won the Giro dell’Emilia and Tre Valli Varesine in the week before the main event. The prospect of a mini-clash between Ineos and Jumbo-Visma in Lombardia was the perfect opening salvo in the phoney war of the 2020 Grand Boucle.
The race played true to form. Ineos made a big statement by doing the work up and over the Madonna del Ghisallo climb and into the horrendously steep Muro di Sormano. And after attacks on the Sormano thinned the field out and left a group of 16 chasing a group of 22 chasing Tim Wellens and Emanuel Buchmann, who’d attacked off the descent, it was Jumbo-Visma who led the pursuit of the leading pair.
However, these were grand tour tactics in a one-day race. While Ineos and Jumbo created a lot of heat and noise by assertively massing their riders at the front, Trek-Segafredo had been quietly operating their own tactical plan. They’d put Toms Skujinņš into the early break, and it was their rider Giulio Ciccone who had instigated the aggression up and over the Sormano which had reduced the lead group to fewer than 40 riders. When surges by David Gaudu and then Valverde on the early slopes of the Civiglio reduced the lead group to around a dozen riders, Trek put part three of their plan into operation.
Mollema’s attack didn’t just work because he was strong and resilient (and very fast on the descents, where his chasers made little impression on him). The composition of the group was also in his favour. Initially, there were 16 other riders, and Bora, Groupama, Ineos and Mitchelton had numbers. But after Latour and then Roglic chased, no team had more than one rider anywhere near the front, and each fresh attack brought to mind the image of a boxer punching himself in the face.
In the end, Valverde went away on the descent, and Bernal and then Jakob Fuglsang bridged across, to make a three-man sprint for second place, which Valverde edged. Mollema’s move might not have been pretty, but nobody judges a results sheet by the neatness of the handwriting.
Ineos made a big statement by doing the work up and over the Madonna del Ghisallo climb. However, these were grand tour tactics in a one-day race