INTENSE & PURPOSE
There will never be another classics season like it. The experiment forced on cycling by covid, in which the biggest one-day races were shoehorned into two ludicrously intense periods either side of the September Tour de France, will probably not be repeated. Italy, out of necessity, had already condensed an entire year into eight days by running Milan-San Remo, harbinger of spring, one week and Il Lombardia, the autumn classic, the next in August. The four weeks following the Tour were even more slapdash: the Worlds, Liège, Gent-Wevelgem and Flanders in four consecutive weekends. Yes, usually April packs in six big one-day races and a few more semi-classics, but usually we don’t also have the Giro d’Italia running concurrently, along with the Vuelta a España.
We’ll start at the end, or almost at the end, because the narrative drive of the 2020 classics season pushed inevitably to the moment in the Tour of Flanders when Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel and Julian Alaphilippe came together on the Taaienberg.
The race was a perfect four-act play: exposition, rising action, catastrophe and denouement. The stretch of the
