The Strade Bianche – races in the spirit of Coppi and Bartali

“Yes, here it is!” René van Bakel stands on his toes to watch Tadej Pogacar thunder past on the gravel of Le Tolfe. Van Bakel doesn’t have to stick his neck out very far: he is a head taller than the Italians who are cheering in the corner here.

With 80 kilometers to go, Pogacar has started a heroic solo – just as he had announced in advance. On his second pass at Le Tolfe, his lead over the pursuers is three minutes – victory can no longer escape him. A grin can be seen on his face: the effort still seems to be no problem for him, even after almost two hundred kilometers of racing.

Van Bakel, dressed in a bright orange cycling shirt, looks around with amusement. The atmosphere on the last gravel section of the Strade Bianche is cheerful. The audience – Germans, Dutch, British, but especially many Italians – stands two rows deep. There is beer and there is wine. Parmaharm is cut on a table behind us and placed on large hunks of bread. “Paolo!” the spectators suddenly shout. Former world champion Paolo Bettini walks past, at his leisure, shaking hands here and there.

In the first weekend of March, Siena is flooded with cycling tourists such as René van Bakel. Watching the professional race on Saturday, cycling on Sunday for the tour, the ‘gran fondo’, together with almost seven thousand other enthusiasts. You see them everywhere in and around Siena: groups of men – especially men – in down jackets and jeans on terraces, or in full cycling regalia with expensive bicycles. They pass by in large numbers on the course, ahead of the drivers. At Le Tolfe. Or in the Via Santa Caterina, the absurdly steep last kilometer in Siena.

Longing for the past

Anyone who stands in the sun at Le Tolfe will understand very well why the Strade Bianche appeals so much to the imagination. While the gray winter reigns in Northern Europe, spring has already started in Tuscany on the first weekend in March. It is a breathtaking race, with 70 kilometers (for men) and 40 (women) kilometers of unpaved white roads (sterrati). The riders who pass by are covered from top to bottom with white matter. And all this through the Tuscan hilly landscape full of cypresses and pine trees, which seems to have hardly changed since the times of Michelangelo and Macchiavelli. Past villages with names such as San Quirico d’Orcia and Monteroni d’Arbia. Ending in Siena at the Piazza del Campo, the square where the Palio horse race is held twice a year.

The Strade Bianche feels like it has always been there. Yet the race certainly does not have the seniority of the Tour of Flanders (1913) or Paris-Roubaix (1896). In fact, the ‘the southernmost northern classic’ is a very young cycling race: the first edition for men was held in 2007, the women started for the first time in 2015.

The Strade Bianche was created from a longing for the past. The race stems from a ‘retro tour’ called the Eroica, which has been held on Tuscan gravel roads since the 1990s. With the event, creator Giancarlo Brocci, a former journalist from the Chianti region, wanted to revive the romance of the early years of cycling: steel bicycles, woolen jerseys, unpaved roads, spare tire on the shoulder; cycling as in the time of Coppi and Bartali.

With the first professional edition in 2007, the old bikes and retro outfits disappeared, but the romance of the unpaved roads remained. From the start, the Strade Bianche turned out to be a major race in which only the very strongest were victorious. Just look at the list of winners, which almost exclusively consists of big names such as Wout van Aert, Fabian Cancellara (three times), Julian Alaphilippe, Mathieu van der Poel. The same story for the women: Elisa Longo Borghini, Anna van der Breggen, Annemiek van Vleuten, Demi Vollering.

Status of ‘monument’

In the sun of Le Tolfe, the supporters cheer equally hard for everyone: for Pogacar, for his pursuers, for the last riders in the race. René van Bakel takes out a plastic bag with fudge. He has been cycling all his adult life, he says. But riding on unpaved roads gave his cycling life a new impetus a few years ago. He bought a gravel bike and became a member of a second cycling club, Ons Verzet from Schaik – especially for ‘gravel’. He is “completely crazy” about it.

So he had to do the Strade Bianche. His wife encouraged him: she has had a muscle disease for three years, “and that has changed our mindset: if you like something, you should do it immediately.” Van Bakel took it extremely seriously: lost six kilos, trained for three months with a cycling coach. At the beginning of January he loaded the course onto his cycling computer and already cycled completely on the indoor trainer – for six hours, at home in the garage in Oss. “My children said: Dad seems to have gone crazy.”

The popularity of the Strade Bianche is so great that there are calls for the race to be awarded the status of ‘monument’: a predicate that the international cycling union UCI came up with for the five most famous one-day classics: Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Lombardy. All races are at least a hundred years old and at least 200 kilometers long. Races that give the winning teams twice as many points as the Strade Bianche.

The organization of the Strade, the Italian company RCS, openly says that it aspires to monument status. To make the race even more classic-worthy, the organization has expanded the men’s course this year with an extra loop of 30 kilometers and four stars, making the Strade now longer than 200 kilometers.

Steep climbs

And that while the price was already not bad. The steep climbs and descents on the gravel roads – designed for tractors, not for a cycling peloton – also made the ‘old’ Strade one of the toughest races of the spring. “Because of that gravel, your bike is always in danger of slipping out from under you,” says Italian rider Alberto Bettiol. “It is best to brake as little as possible. You need a lot of confidence to race here.”

For Bettiol (30), the Strade is a special race, he says from his hotel room two days earlier. The rider, employed by the Education First team, was born and raised in the province of Siena and lives practically on the Strade route. As a fourteen-year-old boy he saw the Swiss great Fabian Cancellara triumph, and on Saturday he was at the start of the race for the eighth time as a professional rider – a record. When he is at home in Castelfiorentino, the white gravel roads are his training area. He knows every bend and every slope inside out. His father is in the organization of the Strade Bianche, a group of ten friends assisted his team on Saturday with supplies and spare tires.

It is extremely difficult to race on the Tuscan unpaved roads, says Bettiol. More difficult, he dares to say, than on the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix – which he knows from a Tour stage in 2022. “At Roubaix you have much more vibration. But the roads are usually straight and flat, so ultimately there is less technology involved.” Unlike in the flat northern France, the gravel roads of the Strade Bianche are constantly going up and down, says Bettiol. “You have to make turns on steep descents, on gravel, with holes to the left and right of you and sometimes large stones in the middle of the road. So you have to be able to steer extremely well.”

Alberto Bettiol loves the Strade. But no matter how much he would like to say it, “as a Tuscan and as an enthusiast from the very beginning”, it would not be right if the race became the ‘sixth monument’. “The monuments are competitions with a long history, such as the grand slams in tennis. They are something sacred.” Bettiol won one himself, in 2019: the Tour of Flanders. “That was the best victory of my life. A monument takes you to another planet.”

‘Super atmosphere’

In the women’s race on Saturday it will be exciting until the last kilometer, on the Via Santa Caterina in Siena. There, Belgian world champion Lotte Kopecky outruns her fellow escapee Elisa Longo Borghini (Italy). Third place goes to the Dutch Demi Vollering, who defeated her teammate Kopecky last year with less than half a cushion length difference.

As is already clear, the men’s race ends 80 kilometers before the finish. Tadej Pogacar wins the Strade Bianche for the second time, with an advantage of almost three minutes over Toms Skujins from Latvia. Third is the Belgian Maxim van Gils. At the finish line he holds his bike in the air. At no race in Italy, he says afterwards in front of the NOS camera, has he ever seen such a “super atmosphere” as at the climb of La Tolfe. And Alberto Bettiol? He will not be involved in his eighth edition: he finishes in more than fifteen minutes and comes in seventieth.

At La Tolfe the sun has almost disappeared behind the hills. When the last riders have passed, the spectators begin to descend. On foot, bottles of beer in hand, or by bike. René van Bakel also leaves to go back to his hotel. He is going to “take it easy” tonight: rest in bed, eat, maybe take an evening walk. Tomorrow is the big day he has been training for all these months. His ambition is modest: “Finishing cleanly is a victory.”

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