Milano-Sanremo 2009 - The Sprint of the Century

by Edward Pickering
Procycling, March 2016

IN MY OPINION, the sprint with which Mark Cavendish won the 2009 Milan-Sanremo was the greatest single road cycling exploit I have ever seen. It impressed me more than Roche’s comeback on La Plagne in the 1987 Tour, LeMond’s 1989 TT, Indurain’s Luxembourg and Bergerac TTs in 1992 and 1994, Pantani’s win at Deux-Alpes, Landis at Morzine, Cancellara in Paris-Roubaix 2010 or Boonen in Roubaix 2012. (Notwithstanding that some of these, helped by doping, don’t really count.)

The 2009 Sanremo wasn’t a vintage edition of the race. As recent years go, I’d say 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013 were all much more absorbing and tactically interesting events. In 2009, the peloton sleepwalked into a sprint – Davide Rebellin and Filippo Pozzato tried attacking on the Poggio, but got nowhere, and that was it – a medium-sized bunch of 51 riders hit the streets of Sanremo.

So, yes, it was a seven-hour race in which not much happened, until that point possibly the least-interesting Primavera I’d ever endured. However, things finally got interesting when Heinrich Haussler surged with 300 metres to go and got what looked like an insurmountable gap. If it had been any other year, Haussler would have won, and we might now be talking about the most forgettable Milan-Sanremo in history. But Mark Cavendish, initially boxed in the group behind, was at the zenith of his ambition and energy. He was in the middle of a period in which he was so unbeatable, he wouldn’t even lose from a situation in which he was beaten, and he launched himself after Haussler. The head-on shot was the most dramatic: Haussler, 10 or 15 metres clear, weaving across the road, to the right, to the left, and back to the right, tracked by Cavendish, greedily sucking up Haussler’s slipstream. There was nowhere near enough road left for Cavendish to win, but he somehow found it. He won by 1cm.

I’ve been watching cycling for over 30 years, and seen some great sprinters – Van Poppel, Bontempi, Cipollini, Petacchi, McEwen, Kittel, Greipel… None of these has anything in their huge win lists to match Cavendish’s Sanremo sprint. It was a once-in-a-generation exploit, the sprint of the century.