A race for heroes
While many of the major races on professional cycling’s calendar now have an accompanying sportive, the Strade Bianche elite road race is perhaps the first to be inspired by a granfondo. L’Eroica is the event in question, of course, the finest of all non-competitive mass participation events in our experience, and race organisers, the RCS, have embraced much of its spirit in celebrating cycling of yore.
Chief among the Strade Bianche’s requirements for racing of a more ‘heroic’ style is the banning of race radios. While participants in the granfondo are prohibited from riding bicycles made after 1987, so directeurs determined to call the shots in the professional race are forced to do so from the window of the team car: a difficult task, unless your rider is in a leading group.
Evidence of the positive effect on racing wrought from an absence of instructions relayed through an ear piece was not difficult to find in the eighth Strade Bianche. A mid-race break from a group containing riders of the quality of Evans and Stannard was subjected to a determined pursuit from Sagan, Cancellara, Kreuziger et al, furnished with little more than numbers on a chalk board and unwilling to allow a potentially race-winning move to go clear.
Winning the Strade Bianche is never easy, and demands of the rider the ability to hold steady over the often-treacherous white roads, as well as to power their way up the leg-sapping gradients that characterise Tuscany. Kwiatkowski adds his name to a largely distinguished roster that includes Cancellara and Gilbert. Creating a race in the image of a sportive can create the sense of the tail wagging the dog, but when the granfondo is L’Eroica, the model is valid.
