The new Bahrain pro worked for the team and retired after 180 of the 260km. Asgreen’s victory over Van der Poel
The first time at the Tour of Flanders, the race of walls and cobblestones, one of the symbols of world cycling, is never forgotten. Especially if you are twenty years old, until two years before you saw that distant and almost unreachable world and even if you saw the royal, and not obvious, sprint between Van der Poel and Asgreen on your team bus after you retired afterwards 180 km because “the lights went out”. Jonathan Milan, the Friulian of Bahrain Victorious, on Monday 5 April closed his campaign in the north made up of experience, kilometers, walls, returning to Buja and focusing on the appointment of the year: the Olympics with the track quartet.
“But as soon as I landed in Venice there was a sun that made me want to take a ride”, he told us, so as to convey the idea of the character, now adopted by the most experienced of the team from Colbrelli to the Austrian Haller, yesterday in the heat of the race to the last.
Let’s start from the morning of Easter: «I was in the room with Colbrelli – explains the son of art – who filled me with advice. Then I ate a nice stuffed omelette, some cooked ham, white rice and off to my first Flanders. The task that the sporting directors had entrusted to me was to keep the captains ahead at the beginning and make them take the first walls in the head, I think I did it well ».
A guy from Friuli in Flanders, feelings? “So much emotion, even if there weren’t the thousands of people who, without viruses, would have been on the roadside. I think facing the walls with the public cheering you on and without them are two different things, but the goosebumps were there ».
And also the awareness that that up there in the north will be his hunting ground for the future: «In 4-5 years the goal is to run to the North as a protagonist, I like stones and walls. You know the Sammardenchia in Tarcento, here you immainate something so as to face dozens of times for someone like me who weighs 86-87 kg and is 1.94 tall … But it is my bread and, now that they have postponed the Roubaix in October, after the Olympics I’d like to go and try that race too ».
Van der Poel, (“who lost perhaps because he attacked too much”), Asgreen, Van Aert, Sagan? No doubt: «Phenomena, running alongside them is a pleasure and have you seen the English Pidcock from Ineos who is only a year older than me, how fast did he go? “. In the race then on Sunday the Swiss Ag2r Shär was disqualified for having given a bottle to the fans during the race. “The regulation is clear, for heaven’s sake, but the UCI should use common sense, making our fans happy is one of the best things about this sport.” First pro balance? Milan is euphoric: “I’m at the playground, the track manager Villa follows me step by step, the team loves me and they even gave me a nickname:” the bull of Buja “, it is in the emblem of my municipality, perhaps for that “. Or, more likely, because they immediately realized that the boy is pulling hard.