Strade Bianche is one of the greatest success stories in present day road cycling. The cyclists love it. The media loves it. The fans love it.The event takes place on Tuscany’s scenic roads, which is almost like a guarantee for global success. It includes gravel sectors, those famous white roads the race its name has got from, what makes it part of a new trend, the growing popularity of gravel races.
There is little wonder that more and more road cycling fans refer to it as the 6th Monument.
Because this is how the other five Monuments were born. People started calling them so.
The Monuments (Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Paris-Roubaix, Giro di Lombardia, Milano-Sanremo and Ronde van Vlaanderen ) are amomg the oldest and longest one-day races carrying huge amount of history in themselves. Sometimes not only road cycling history, but like in case of Paris-Roubaix, mementos of important historical events.1
Created during the early days of cycling ( two of them, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Paris-Roubaix have their roots back in the 19th century) they have always been some kind of bastions of road cycling history. One of the reasons why they have gained such importance is that they collided with each other in the racing calendar quite rarely, even in those days, when professional cycling events weren’t coordinated so routinously like nowadays. Therefore it was always highly possible that
the biggest stars of each era would come together to race against each other.
Actually the same happening with Strade Bianche, set relatiively early in the racing calendar, the biggest stars come together to create a great race. Some of them might never attend the Opening Weekend, the two Flemish cobbled classics a week earlier, but they are at the start of Strade Bianche. (Just take a look at the final group of six riders at the 2021 edition of the race.)
But there is something important what we will never witness at Strade Bianche.
We will never see how Fausto Coppi or Eddy Merckx (or other legends of this sport) would have raced Strade Bianche if the race would have existed in their days.
Just think about it again: the other five are called Monuments – an obvious reference to their historical aspects.
All the five races was held for the first time before World War I, whic in my opinion remarks also the end of the first period of road cycling history. Even those stars from the early days, lilke Lucien Petit-Breton or Octave Lapize, who have lost their life during the fights, had their moments at these races. (Petit-Breton won the first two editions of Milano-Sanremo. Lapize was the first cyclist to win Paris-Roubaix three times.)
The Monuments are carrying
stong connection to the birth of the bicycle and cycling as a sport
in their tradition. Not only just the facts that newspapers were involved in the creation of all of them. But for example Liège-Bastogne-Liège, originally an amateur race, was first planned between Spa and Bastogne, and was little bit of a disaster. Some cyclists did not bother to continue the race after the turning point in Bastogne, rather took the train to go back. Also, there is no wonder that the two Italian Momuments are located in Lombardy, the most industrially developed region of the country, where the bicycle manufacturing was thriving during the turn of the century. (Even the Giro d’Italia started from the La Gazetta dello Sport HQ in Milano during the early years.)
And again. How would a cycling race be able to represent not only the present but also the past ( why else to be called a “monument”), if the greatest legends of the is sport were never involved?
Of course, I should never say never. If the human race will still exist two or three hundreds years from now, and if road cycling races will be still organized, people of those days will have differnt perspectives. Obviously, lots of things will happen both in and outside the world of sport. Some of them will be cosidered such kind of watersheds like we used to think of the two big wars of the 20th century. There will be new rising stars, who might fall in obscurity a few decades later. there will be new fascinating stories and unbelievable records.
And who knows.
Maybe people from 2424 will see our time as still part of the “early days” of road cycling.
Then it would make sense that a popular race was born in the early days of 21st century, that inspires and give joys to so many people, that plays an important role in the birth of new cyc!ing stars would be put in the same box like some very similar races crewted a century earlier.
But until then lest just distinguish Strade Bianche from the good old Monuments.
Why we don’t just celebrate it’s uniqueness?
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- Paris -Roubaix was called “Hell of the North” for the very first time in 1919, when organizers, cyclists and journalists first visited the north-eastern part of France after the devastating years of World War I. [↩]