Road racing’s back! Catch every monumental moment of the 2023 cycling season on GCN+

Spring is here (despite what the weather might be telling you at the moment), the warmup races on the Med and in the Middle East have been and gone, and for many cycling fans the best part of the cycling year is fast approaching: it’s time for the classics!

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And, if the opening acts of the classics campaign are anything to go by, the 2023 vintage is going to be a cracker. At an exhilarating edition of Strade Bianche, Tom Pidcock stormed across the Tuscan gravel to make history by becoming the first British male – and second Brit ever, after Lizzie Deignan – to win the coveted Italian race.

[Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com]

Jumbo-Visma and SD Worx, meanwhile, dominated the men’s and women’s races, respectively, at Opening Weekend (with SD Worx adding to their growing aura of invincibility with a thrilling one-two at Strade Bianche), laying down an ominous marker – if both squads can keep the potential for internecine conflict in check – to their rivals for the rest of the spring campaign.

But, as important as Strade Bianche has become in recent years, Milan-San Remo – which rolls out from the small town of Abbiategrasso this Saturday morning – remains to most observers the true start of the classics season, the cycling world’s annual symbol of the transition from winter to spring.

The first of the sport’s five one-day ‘monuments’, Milan-San Remo is something of an anachronism in modern cycling.

[Zac Williams/SWpix.com]

At around 300km, it’s traditionally the longest single race on the calendar, with around half of the mammoth route covering the flat plains of the Po Valley, before an almost equally flat run west along the Ligurian coast to the home of Italy’s famous music festival.

There are no gimmicks – Milan-San Remo doesn’t have the gravel of Strade Bianche, or the desperately savage cobbles of Paris-Roubaix.

But it does have arguably the best half hour in the whole of the cycling calendar, when the sport’s intrinsic, and essential, ritual of waiting, waiting, waiting finally gives way to a fiery crescendo on the final two climbs and the heart-in-mouth run-in to the finish.

On the Cipressa and Poggio, 280km of anticipation results in an explosion of action unlike any other in cycling. Mere pimples compared to the Dolomite monsters to come in May at the Giro d’Italia, their relatively benign stature is central to the race’s unique character. Because, essentially, Milan-San Remo is anyone’s monument: thanks to its distance and unpredictable route, sprinters, attackers, rouleurs, and grand tour contenders can all dream of glory on Via Roma.

[Sprint Cycling Agency]

Last year, Matej Mohorič – with the help of his now-famous dropper post – unleashed the most spectacular descent of the Poggio in thirty years, bouncing off the walls and jumping out of gutters to take his first monument win in exhilarating fashion. While the Slovenian may lack the same element of surprise this time around, he will nonetheless be aiming to once again distance his rivals on those famous bends on Saturday.

Meanwhile, 2020 winner Wout van Aert enters Milan-San Remo, as he does every year, as the favourite, but he’ll face stiff competition from his cyclocross rival Mathieu van der Poel, who is yet to break his duck at La Primavera. 

[LaPresse]

And, as if to underline the wide-open character of San Remo, double Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar and sprint supremo Caleb Ewan will both once again take on cycling’s longest race with dreams of monument glory.

And once the winner of the first monument of the season is decided, the racing action will continue to come thick and fast, with the men’s and women’s editions of the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Amstel Gold, La Flèche Wallonne, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, as well as a host of other major one-day classics and stage races, taking place before the end of April.

And then, of course, it won’t be long until grand tour season commences…

So, if you don’t want to miss all the monumental racing action this year, look no further than GCN+, the home of live cycling. GCN+ will bring you every unmissable moment from the fast-approaching classics campaign, as well as every attack, split, mechanical mishap, and sprint from the rest of the racing season.

With a GCN+ subscription, you can watch live and uninterrupted coverage of the biggest (and even the not so big) races all year round, from the beautiful grandeur of road racing and the fast and furious action on the track, to the breath-taking skills on display during the MTB and cyclocross seasons, all available at any time on any screen so you never need to miss a thing.

And if you can’t catch the racing live, you can still make use of the full race replays, on-demand highlights, and in-depth pre- and post-race analysis on GCN+ to make the most of your subscription and avoid missing a second. Fancy heading out for an actual cycle when a stage is on? No problem, you can pause and pick up where you left off, or catch up in full later.

There are also highlights packages tailormade to suit any schedule, from long, in-depth recaps to short summaries, or even just the final, action-packed kilometres.

And if you’re really pushed for time, GCN+ also rounds up all the best moments from the week in their exclusive World of Cycling show.

Well, if all that live racing, on-demand stage replays, time-saving highlights packages, and pre and post-race analysis by some of the best pundits in the sport (with some questionable dance routines thrown in for good measure) really isn’t enough, GCN+ also has a library of over 150 exclusive cycling documentaries available on demand, covering all aspects of the sport from chats with legends to epic adventures and record-breaking challenges – making it the one-stop subscription service for cycling fans throughout the cycling year.

Subscribe to GCN+ for £39.99 per year or £6.99 per month