It’s the fourth Monument of the cycling season, a 258-kilometer one-day race in the Wallonia (French-speaking) region of Belgium that, unlike most modern courses, lives up to its name and departs from Liege, heads south to Bastogne, and then takes a different, savagely hilly route back to Liege.
It makes sense to discuss what exactly the Monuments are and what makes them so special. They are a set of five one-day races more prestigious and generally older than the rest, with the exception of the World Championships Road Race. Liege is also the traditional end of the Spring Classics season.
The Monuments are longer than most other one-day races, traditionally well over 250 kilometers in length (though Lombardia, the only autumn Monument, tends to be slightly shorter these days). With the exception of a few, like Amstel Gold Race and Gent-Wevelgem, the rest of the non-Monument Classics are capped at around 200. Because the average speed of a WorldTour peloton is around 40 kilometers per hour (though this is extremely misleading, which I will explain in another post), the best way to envisage this added distance is approximately an extra hour of racing. Milano-Sanremo, the first Monument of the season, is the longest race in the WorldTour calendar, clocking in around 294 kilometers, depending on minor tweaks the organizers make to the route each year. So MSR has traditionally been a seven-hour race, while the other Monuments are around six.
As a side note, however, speeds are getting faster and faster. In 2023, MSR held its second-fastest ever edition finishing in 6:25 with an average speed of 45.8kph. Ronde Van Vlaanderen (English: Tour of Flanders) set a speed record at 44.1 kph. Paris-Roubaix annihilated its speed record with 46.8kph, finishing in just 5:28. That is 29 miles per hour for 256 kilometers including 55 kilometers of some of the roughest cobblestones one would ever imagine riding a bike over.
In my view, the organizers of the Monuments should consider increasing the distance to ensure the race time is up to par. I personally would love to see a 350-kilometer MSR. It’s a boring race until the final hour, but a course redesign could spice things up. Anyway, enough about race duration.
Each Monument suits a different type of rider (though today’s superstars are more versatile than they used to be), but the length is vital to their prestige and selectivity. The attritional nature of a longer, typically harder race means fewer riders will arrive at the finish line in a group. The idea is to flesh out the strongest riders whose endurance can tolerate six or seven hours of hammering away on the pedals.
Most of the top riders in the world cannot do this. Wout van Aert of Belgium is an excellent example of a top rider who in my view cannot properly handle the Monument distance. Each year, he shows up at the Tour de France as Superman. Last year he was the strongest rider in the race aside from Pogacar and Vingegaard. In the prior Tour he won a mountain stage, a sprint stage (on the Champs-Elysees!), and a time trial, which many (myself included) believed would never happen again with cycling as specialized as it seemed to be becoming in the 2010s. Wout is clearly a supreme cyclist. But the Tour de France only once in the past decade has had a single stage approaching 250 kilometers. Wout was in that race in a crazy breakaway and could not make any hay. He finished 8th on that stage. So Wout is crazy strong in Tour de France stages which typically max out around 210k and are often significantly shorter.
But as a Flandrien, the second-best rider on Earth by consistency, and a ridiculously versatile athlete, he should dominate the Monuments. Yet he has only taken one victory in his entire career, MSR 2020. There are many strange results in 2020 as the cycling season was delayed into the late summer and fall due to COVID restrictions in Europe. I believe this was one of them. MSR, despite being longer than the other Monuments, is also a race in which raw endurance is not quite as important because it so easy (flat) for the first five-plus hours and culminates with a harder few efforts, well-suited to Wout’s characteristics.
That was a long-winded way of saying that Liege is a hard race, in some ways the hardest of all the Monuments. It has 4,000 meters of elevation gain, which is on par with a Grand Tour Mountain stage. The difference is that the vast majority of the 11 categorized climbs and relentless hills are quite short for a WorldTour rider, while a traditional mountain stage might only take on two or three big passes in a day.
The climbs towards the end of the race are quite steep, ranging from 5 to 13 percent average gradient and one to 4.5 kilometers.
The traditional formula of the race is that a weak breakaway goes up the road in the morning, goes full gas for 150-200k on the hills, and gets slowly strangled by the patient peloton. The race potentially opens up La Redoute, the peak of which is 34 kilometers from the line. More common is that the winner waits until the short, steep final climb, Roche-aux Faucons (14k from the finish) to make his move, and either goes solo or takes a group with him for a small sprint in the final flat kilometer.
Last year, however, Remco Evenepoel, the current World Champion, attacked on La Redoute and soloed 30k to the finish line for a famous victory. Despite being just 22 years of age, Remco is really f***ing good (one of the six non-mortals in cycling these days), and he specializes in those long solos that cannot be brought back without a TDF Jumbo-Visma train (the strongest team) chasing it.
That will not happen in this edition of Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Quite simply, there is a rider in the race who skipped it last year due to the tragic death of his mother-in-law. But he will take the start tomorrow. Yes, his name is Tadej Pogacar: the cyclist looking to complete the rare Ardennes triple,; the 2021 winner of Liege; the double Tour champ; the best rider on Earth; and the only man in cycling building a GOAT resume.
These two are the heavy, heavy favorites. It looks like a battle for third place for everybody else. I don’t even want to bother previewing the fight for the final podium spot, such is the brilliance of these two gods. But which one will win?
Remco of course can win this race. He just will be unable to impose his will like he did last year. Pogacar, unless on a pretty bad day or short of form following a long spring season, will not drop on the main climbs. And he would be the big favorite in a two-man sprint, or even a group sprint. So Remco needs to either hope for a bad day from his rival or get away at a clever spot and use his “aero-bullet” characteristic to make it hard for Pogacar to catch him (and hope that UAE has already burnt its team).
UAE has a pretty strong team for this race despite losing one of its top domestiques, Diego Ulissi, to illness. But because of Pogacar’s dominance, they will be leant heavily on to control the race from start to finish, a taller task in a 258k slugfest with all of that elevation gain. This will force them to sacrifice a few riders just in the service of controlling the breakaway. That being said, I expect Quick-Step, the team of Remco, to offer up a domestique or two early merely to help reel in what could be a stronger breakway.
I expect the race to pan out as normal, every other contender to ride for third place (as they all rode for second in Amstel), and these two favorites to drop the rest on Roche-aux Faucons and the race to come down to a sprint.
But what should happen is other teams riding a creative and aggressive Liege, doing absolutely everything possible to send strong riders in the breakaway, attacking at surprising points, employing satellite riders if they make the break, anything to put UAE under pressure and isolate Pogacar as early as they can.
It will not happen.
Tadej Pogacar wins his second Liege-Bastogne-Liege, fifth Monument, and becomes the first rider in history to complete the Ardennes triple in the same season as the Ronde Van Vlaanderen.
Puncheur 
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