The cycling season, orphaned by Alberto Contador, who was suspended for suspected doping until August, is now in full swing. Sanremo and Ghent-Wevelgem, which acts as a prologue to the great classics of the North, have confirmed that Fabian Cancellara is undoubtedly today the strongest and most spectacular rider in the group for one-day races but the one who wins the most for the moment is another returning champion, Tom Boonen. With Philppe Gilbert lagging behind in preparation and with a strangely tarnished Mark Cavendish, it is to the two of them, the Swiss champion and the Belgian sprinter, that the cycling of well-known names, those who have always made the history of the sport of the bicycle, clings to break the series of victories by runners who emerge from anonymity juxtaposed to win the great classic and then return without leaving any traces of themselves.
At the time of Coppi, Koblet, Bobet it was also amusing to see for once the unknown German Muller win the 1952 world championship or a certain Roger Walkowiack wear the yellow jersey in Paris in 1956 mocking all the predictions that were for Charly Gaul, the winner of the Ride in the freezing Bondone but stranded in the Tour by a terrible sunstroke. Then came the time of Merck and the cannibal accustomed the world to seeing him win everything from February to October. Other times. Today the list that makes us say "who on earth has won" is getting longer and longer in the orders of arrival of the last 12 months: from Johan Vansummeren's Roubaix to Nick Nuyens' Tour of Flanders to Lombardia which saw the success of Oliver Zaugg.
Even this year's Sanremo with Simon Gerrans' winning rush on Cancellara ended up rewarding the current Carneade. Last year it was only Gilbert who broke this sequence of non-designer victories with a spectacular double in Liège-Bastogne-Liège and in the Freccia Vallone. This year, the two consecutive victories of Tom Boonen, who after the Harelbeke Grand Prix also won the Ghent-Wevelgem for the third time, a classic that is not a "monument" but full of walls where once again Cancellara but also Oscar Freire and Peter Sagan have shown, unlike Cavendish and Gilbert, that they are in great shape. Boonen, leader of Omega Pharma-Quick Step, has a palmarés as a true champion of online racing: won a world championship, two Tours of Flanders, three Paris-Roubaix. Few other active racers can boast such a list of successes in one-day races.
Cancellara and Boonen are at the top of the bookmakers' predictions for this year's Flanders: the Swiss is given at 3,60; Boonen at 4. Then there is the void given that Sagan, brilliant at the Three Days of De Panne, is placed only at 12, Gilbert at 20 on a par with our Filippo Pozzato. Ballan – moreover embroiled in an investigation into doping by the Vicenza prosecutor's office – is offered at 50. This will be on Sunday a Tour of Flanders which for the first time will not climb the Grammont wall, which has always been an icon of the Belgian race with its breathtaking slopes. The arrival also changes, no longer in the gray and anonymous Meerbeke but in Oudenaarde, a city rich in Flemish history and culture where there is also a bike museum curated by Freddy Martens, a thoroughbred sprinter from the XNUMXs. Not even the less famous Bosberg is gone with the Grammont. In their place, however, other terrible paved walls such as the Qwaremont, the Koppenberg and the Paterberg to be repeated three times, the last of which is just 14 kilometers from the finish line, a climb on which everyone awaits Cancellara's attack. Boonen and the others are warned. Guaranteed show. And in seven days, at Easter, Paris-Roubaix, the hell of the North, is coming.
