A stage race is a soap opera on two wheels. It’s a daily dose of team-work and feuds, one day focusing on one plot line, another the next with a different set of characters, but always setting up something for the next day’s instalment.
The Spring Classics are, on the face of it, a simpler beast. Everyone is concerned with getting themselves or their team leader from start to finish, as quickly as possible.
A series of self-contained movies, with an overarching connected thread, the Marvel Cinematic Universe of bike racing.
Like superhero antics there is a brutal side to these races, be it the savagery of the Roubaix cobbles or the sharp gradient of the Mur de Huy. Ultimately, though, it’s the characters, the complexities that lie behind the…
