Strade Bianche nears as the strangest season starts anew

On the heels of Strade Bianche and the start of a compacted 2020 calendar, the misery of pedalling indoors for hours on end is fading, yet the shadow of this asterisk season still looms.

What will it actually look like? For Strade Bianche, it won’t be the wet Spring roads to which the race owes some of its infamy (pictured above on a glorious day in 2018). Quite the opposite, the parcours (184km, 11 sectors and 63km on gravel roads (34.2% of the course)) will be run during a bone-dry Sienna summer, the forthcoming images to look much more like a dry Roubaix only with more dirt, I imagine.

Come biblical rain or scorching heat however, the fact that it’s happening, in a season that seemed done in March, is a dream. With so much virtual racing in their legs, no matter how laboured or contrived it seemed, and kicking off with Burgos, an event unknown save for this season, the next three months might be the best bit of bike racing cycling has ever known. From the gun, it’s not going to stop.

Unfortunate that it is only beginning in that halcyon haze of the professional racing calendar when typically so many races are done, when fans and riders can appreciate a little post Tour lull - the perfect repose to catch a low stakes criterium, a kermesse, or hell, do something other than pedal biking before the Vuelta starts.

What a strange few months, with all the obvious aside: a Garmin extortion case (like, WTF), a truncated season that was always in doubt, and in some cases, still is, three Grand Tours in three months, demand so high you can’t buy a bike in Europe, build times of 3-8 months for custom work, service appointments booked 4 to 6 weeks out, cycling podcasts rewatching and telling tales about old races. Cycling has never needed normalcy more, no matter how unreal it seems.

It is going to be pretty nice to watch 20-plus teams suffer this Saturday. Even better when it happens seven days later at 111th Milan-Sanremo. From the macabre to the near normal, racing is back. It’s time to dream again.