/ IL LOMBARDIA

ESTABLISHED 1905 EDITIONS 115

More than any other major one-day race, Il Lombardia tilts the playing field definitively towards the climbers. The puncheurs and classics specialists can hope for a good result at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the hilliest of the spring classics, but the climbs around Lake Como are too long and too hard for anybody except pure climbers. The winners in the last nine events - Joaquim Rodríguez, Dan Martin, Vincenzo Nibali, Esteban Chaves, Thibaut Pinot, Bauke Mollema and Jakob Fuglsang - have all finished in the upper reaches of the grand tours.

Il Lombardia seems comfortable in its end-of-season slot, even though it was interesting to watch it contested in the 2020 covid calendar a week after Milan-San Remo and a fortnight before the Tour de France. It gains a lot of prestige from its status as the traditional season-closing race, and it transcends sport as there is an evocative sense of melancholy in its nickname, the ‘Race of the Falling Leaves’. There’s something about holding the race in autumn, as the final act of the European season, that feels right.

At the same time, this makes what is the hardest monument route on paper paradoxically the easiest, or at least the most straightforward to win. By October, most grand tour riders have packed up for the year - an ambitious and industrious climber could therefore automatically assume that the list of possible winners is already quite small. The other classics are keenly contested by all the riders who are suited to them. Il Lombardia lets some fall through the gaps.

Whether the 2020 experiment that was forced on the calendar has any long term implications for Lombardia, some things about it will never change. It will always have the toughest climbing of any of the monuments, and unless the sea views of Milan-San Remo are your thing, the most spectacular scenery. The wooded middle mountains around Lake Como are beautiful, and provide the race with its unique aesthetic.