Every April, while most of the sporting world is watching footballers fall over and golfers stand around in slacks, something extraordinary happens on the roads of Belgium, France, and Italy. Races that predate the Tour de France by decades. Races that take 260 kilometres, condense them into a single afternoon, and produce moments so savage and beautiful that you will remember them years later. No second chances. No tomorrow stage. One day. One shot.
These are the spring classics. And if you do not know them yet, you are missing the best part of cycling.
I have watched and followed the classics for years. I have spoken to former professionals who rode them, coaches who prepared riders for them, and fans who travel across Europe every spring to stand on the side of a cobbled hill in Flanders with a beer and a cowbell. The classics inspire a devotion that stage racing simply does not produce. And here is why.
One-Day Racing vs Stage Racing
Let me break this down, because understanding this distinction changes how you watch the entire sport.
A grand tour — the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia, the Vuelta a Espana — is a three-week war of attrition. You can have a bad day. You can lose time on Stage 7 and claw it back on Stage 15. You can sit in the peloton for an entire week, conserve energy, and then attack when the mountains arrive. The margins are measured in minutes across 21 stages. Patience wins grand tours.
One-day racing is the opposite. You have 250-plus kilometres and roughly six hours to prove you are the strongest rider in the world on that specific day, on that specific course, in those specific conditions. There is no general classification to protect. There is no time to recover from a mistake. If you puncture in the wrong sector of Paris-Roubaix, your race is over. If you miss the decisive attack on the Koppenberg, you are riding for seventh. If you misjudge the wind on the exposed roads before the Carrefour de l'Arbre, you will spend the rest of the afternoon chasing a gap that only gets bigger.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about one-day racing: it rewards a completely different kind of rider. Grand tour winners are typically climbers with metronomic engines — consistent, measured, controlled. Classics riders are explosive, tactically aggressive, physically durable, and comfortable with chaos. Fabian Cancellara, Tom Boonen, Roger De Vlaeminck — these riders were built for suffering that lasts one afternoon, not three weeks. Some of the greatest classics riders in history were mediocre in grand tours. And some of the greatest grand tour riders never managed to win a single Monument.
That separation is what makes the classics so compelling. You cannot predict them. You cannot control them. The best rider does not always win. Sometimes the bravest one does.
The Five Monuments
The Monuments are the five oldest, most prestigious one-day races on the professional calendar. Winning one is a career-defining achievement. Winning two or three puts you among the all-time greats. Only three riders in history — Rik Van Looy, Eddy Merckx, and Roger De Vlaeminck — have won all five. Three riders. In over a century of racing. For context, seven riders have won all three grand tours. The full set of Monuments is rarer.
Each Monument tests something different. Each has a personality, a geography, a type of suffering that belongs to it alone. Let me walk you through them.
Milan-San Remo: The Sprinter's Monument
When: Late March Distance: Roughly 290 km — the longest one-day race in professional cycling Defining feature: The Poggio Character: Deceptive simplicity
Milan-San Remo is the race that looks easy on paper and is fiendishly difficult in practice. Nearly 300 kilometres, mostly flat, following the Italian coastline from Milan down to San Remo on the Ligurian Sea. For the first 250 kilometres, almost nothing happens. The peloton rolls south in a long, tense procession. The sprinters' teams control the front. Everyone waits.
And then the Poggio arrives. A short climb — roughly 3.7 kilometres at 3.7 per cent — that would barely register as a hill on most riders' Strava feeds. But after 280 kilometres of racing, it is where the race explodes. An attacker goes on the Poggio. The sprinters' teams try to bring them back on the twisting descent into San Remo. If the catch is made, you get a bunch sprint on the Via Roma. If it is not, you get a solo winner or a small group fight.
The tactical puzzle is what makes San Remo special. The punchy riders — riders like Julian Alaphilippe or Wout van Aert — want to attack on the Poggio because a sprint gives them worse odds. The pure sprinters want to shut the Poggio down because their top-end speed is their weapon. The entire 290-kilometre race comes down to three minutes on one climb and a 90-second descent. Everything before it is positioning.
This is traditionally called the sprinter's Monument because a bunch sprint on the Via Roma has historically been the most common outcome. But the race has evolved. Stronger, more versatile riders now attack earlier — on the Cipressa, the climb before the Poggio — and the pure sprinters are finding it harder to survive. Jasper Philipsen, Tadej Pogacar, and Van Aert have all won it, but through different methods. The race rewards the rider who reads the day best.
Tour of Flanders: The Ronde
When: First Sunday of April Distance: Roughly 260 km Defining features: The Oude Kwaremont and the Paterberg Character: Controlled violence
The Tour of Flanders — De Ronde van Vlaanderen — is Belgium's national sporting event. It is bigger there than any football match, any tennis final, anything. The entire country stops. Half a million people line the roads. Bars open at seven in the morning. Children are named after winners.
The race is defined by its hellingen — short, steep, cobbled climbs that punctuate the flat Flemish landscape like punches. There are roughly 17 climbs in the race, but the ones that matter are concentrated in the final 100 kilometres. The Koppenberg — 600 metres at 11.6 per cent average, with sections hitting 22 per cent on cobblestones so rough they were once removed from the race after a rider got stuck and had to be pushed off by a spectator. The Taaienberg, the Kruisberg, the Kanarieberg. And then the two that decide everything: the Oude Kwaremont and the Paterberg.
The Oude Kwaremont is 2.2 kilometres of cobbled climbing at a modest average gradient. The Paterberg follows almost immediately — just 360 metres, but averaging 12.9 per cent with a cobbled ramp at the bottom that hits 20 per cent. These two climbs are ridden back-to-back in the closing stages, and they are where the race is won. The pattern is almost always the same. A strong rider — someone like Mathieu van der Poel or Pogacar — attacks on the Kwaremont, the field splinters, and whoever can hold that wheel over the Paterberg has a chance to fight for the win. Everyone else is riding for a placing.
What makes Flanders different from the mountain stages of grand tours is the type of climbing. These are not sustained 20-minute efforts. They are violent, anaerobic explosions that last 90 seconds to three minutes. Power-to-weight matters, but so does bike-handling on cobblestones, positioning in a shrinking peloton, and raw muscular force. The riders who win Flanders tend to be bigger and more powerful than grand tour climbers — they are closer to 75 kilograms than 60. And they need to be, because riding cobblestones at race speed for 260 kilometres breaks the bodies of lighter riders.
Paris-Roubaix: The Hell of the North
When: Second Sunday of April Distance: Roughly 260 km Defining features: 30 sectors of pave Character: Brutality
Paris-Roubaix is different from every other bike race in the world. It is the only major professional race where the finishing order is determined as much by luck and mechanical resilience as by fitness. It is the race most likely to leave you covered in mud, bleeding from road rash, and limping across the line 15 minutes behind the winner. Riders who have won grand tours describe it as the hardest day they have ever had on a bike.
The race crosses roughly 55 kilometres of pave — ancient cobblestoned farm tracks in northern France that were never designed for bicycles. There are 30 sectors, each rated by difficulty from one star to five stars. The five-star sectors — the Trouee d'Arenberg, the Carrefour de l'Arbre, the Mons-en-Pevele — are the ones that decide the race.
The Trouee d'Arenberg is a dead-straight road through a forest. 2.4 kilometres of cobblestones so rough and so jarring that riders' hands go numb, bottles bounce out of cages, and wheels crack under the impact. It comes relatively early in the race and its purpose is destruction. Every year, riders who entered the Arenberg in the front group exit it with a mechanical, a puncture, or a crash that ends their race. The attrition is staggering.
Here is where it gets really interesting. Paris-Roubaix rewards a very specific kind of rider — heavy, powerful, technically skilled, and mentally comfortable with suffering that goes beyond normal. The ideal Roubaix winner is somebody who can absorb punishment for five hours, stay near the front across every sector, avoid or recover from the crashes that take out half the field, and then still have enough left to win from a small group in the velodrome in Roubaix. Fabian Cancellara won it three times. Tom Boonen won it four times. These are riders built like middleweight boxers, not marathon runners.
The finish inside the old Roubaix velodrome — a creaking, atmospheric oval with a concrete track — is one of the iconic images in all of sport. Riders enter it caked in mud and dust, their faces showing six hours of accumulated punishment, and sprint around half a lap of track to the line. The winner stands on the podium holding a cobblestone trophy. No other race gives you a rock as a prize. No other race should.
Liege-Bastogne-Liege: La Doyenne
When: Late April Distance: Roughly 260 km Defining features: The Cote de la Redoute, the Cote de la Roche-aux-Faucons Character: Relentless attrition
Liege-Bastogne-Liege is the oldest of the five Monuments. First run in 1892. It is called La Doyenne — the Old Lady — and it races through the Ardennes region of southern Belgium, a landscape of rolling, wooded hills and narrow roads that are beautiful in the autumn and savage in the spring.
This is the climber's classic. Not the cobbled savagery of Flanders, not the flat brutality of Roubaix, but sustained climbing across 11 rated ascents totalling over 4,000 metres of elevation gain. The hills in the Ardennes are not Alpine passes — they are between one and three kilometres long, typically at 8-10 per cent gradient — but they come relentlessly. One after another after another. And by the time you reach the decisive climbs in the final 30 kilometres, the accumulated fatigue from 230 kilometres of constant undulation has hollowed out the peloton.
The Cote de la Redoute was historically the race-defining climb — 2 kilometres at 8.9 per cent, often ridden in the rain, where the strongest riders would attack and shatter the field. In recent years, the organisers have pushed the decisive action later by adding the Cote de la Roche-aux-Faucons closer to the finish — a steeper, shorter effort that rewards pure climbing ability.
What separates Liege from a mountain stage in the Tour de France is the length and the accumulated damage. By the time riders hit the Roche-aux-Faucons, they have been racing for six hours across terrain that never lets you rest. There are no flat valleys to recover in. There are no long descents to freewheel down and refuel. Every kilometre is either going up or going down, and both take a toll. The winners of Liege are typically grand tour contenders — Pogacar, Remco Evenepoel, Alejandro Valverde — because the demands are closest to stage racing of any Monument. But the one-day format means that even a grand tour champion can get caught out by a late attack, a misjudged effort, or a rival who simply chose this as their day.
Valverde won Liege four times. Four. In a race that has been contested since Queen Victoria was on the throne. That tells you something about how rare it is to master the Ardennes.
Il Lombardia: The Race of the Falling Leaves
When: October Distance: Roughly 240 km Defining features: The Civiglio and the San Fermo della Battaglia Character: Elegance and danger
Il Lombardia is the outlier among the Monuments. It is not a spring classic — it is raced in October, closing the professional season, when the leaves are turning on the hills above Lake Como and the light has that particular late-autumn quality that makes everything look like an oil painting. It is the most beautiful race in cycling, and possibly the most dangerous.
The route winds through the hills of Lombardy, north of Milan, climbing and descending around the shores of Lake Como. The climbing is real — steeper and more sustained than Liege, with gradients that regularly hit 12-14 per cent — but it is the descents that define Il Lombardia. These are narrow, technical roads with tight hairpins, poor surfaces, and guardrails that were installed before anyone considered what happens when a professional cyclist takes a corner at 80 kilometres per hour. The history of Il Lombardia includes some of the most frightening crashes in professional cycling.
The race has been reshaped in recent years, but the decisive climbs remain the Civiglio and the San Fermo della Battaglia in the closing kilometres. The Civiglio is a proper climb — 4.2 kilometres at 9.7 per cent — and it comes roughly 15 kilometres from the finish. An attack here requires the confidence that you can hold the gap on the San Fermo and then descend safely into Como. Get the attack wrong and you will be caught. Get the descent wrong and the consequences are far worse.
Tadej Pogacar has won Il Lombardia twice, and watching him descend at race speed on those roads is terrifying, even through a television screen. The combination of climbing ability and descending bravery that Il Lombardia demands is unique among the Monuments. It is the race that closest resembles grand tour mountain stages, but compressed into a single afternoon with nothing to protect you if you crack.
The atmosphere in Como on race day is different from the mud and beer of Roubaix or the mayhem of Flanders. It is more refined. Italian fans lining the lakeside road, autumn sunlight on the water, espresso and prosecco at the finish. Il Lombardia is the Monument that reminds you cycling is, at its heart, an Italian and Belgian sport — and the Italians bring the aesthetics.
The Other Classics Worth Watching
The five Monuments sit at the top of the hierarchy, but the supporting cast of one-day races is brilliant in its own right. If you are getting into the classics season, these are the ones that deserve your attention.
Strade Bianche (early March). The newest classic on the calendar and already one of the most popular. Raced on the white gravel roads — the strade bianche — of Tuscany, finishing with a savage climb up to the Piazza del Campo in Siena. The visual spectacle is extraordinary: riders covered in white dust, climbing a medieval ramp into one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. It is the race that made Mathieu van der Poel's legend, and it is the perfect appetiser for the classics season.
Amstel Gold Race (mid-April). The Dutch classic. Short, punchy climbs — the Cauberg is the most famous — through the rolling hills of South Limburg. Tactically complex because the climbs are so short that positioning matters more than pure climbing power. It is the race most likely to produce a surprise winner because the decisive moves can happen on any of the 35 climbs in the final 100 kilometres.
Fleche Wallonne (mid-April). The shortest and most predictable of the Ardennes classics, and I mean that as a compliment. The race is decided almost exclusively on the Mur de Huy — a 1.3-kilometre wall averaging 9.6 per cent that kicks to 26 per cent in the final 200 metres. Whoever is strongest on that one climb wins. Valverde won it five times because he was simply the best in the world at riding up a short, steep hill after 200 kilometres. There is something pure about a race that comes down to a single, devastating effort.
Gent-Wevelgem (late March). A semi-classic that often produces the most exciting racing of the spring because the flat, exposed roads of the Flemish coast create crosswind echelons — those diagonal formations where the peloton splits sideways across the road. If you want to understand why positioning matters in professional cycling, watch Gent-Wevelgem. One gust of wind in the wrong place and half the field is eliminated.
E3 Saxo Classic (late March). Considered the mini Tour of Flanders. It uses many of the same climbs — the Paterberg, the Oude Kwaremont, the Taaienberg — and serves as a dress rehearsal for the Ronde. Some riders deliberately target E3 as a form check before Flanders. Others treat it as a race worth winning in its own right.
These races fill the calendar from late February through to late April, making the classics season the most concentrated and exciting period of racing in the entire year. Six weeks of one-day warfare before the grand tours even begin. If you are only watching the Tour de France, you are seeing less than half the sport.
How to Ride Them Yourself
Here is where it gets really interesting for the rest of us. Because unlike the Tour de France, where the closest an amateur gets is standing on the side of a mountain with a flag, four of the five Monuments have sportive versions that let you ride the same roads as the professionals.
Tour of Flanders Sportive (We Ride Flanders)
The biggest and most established of the Monument sportives. Roughly 17,000 riders annually. Three distance options — 75 kilometres, 143 kilometres, or the full 235-kilometre route that covers every major climb. You ride on Saturday, the pros race on Sunday. The atmosphere is extraordinary. Locals set up barbecues at the foot of every climb. Bars put speakers in their windows. Children hand you sweets at the top of the Koppenberg. It is a festival that happens to involve riding a bicycle up cobbled walls.
What to expect: the cobbled climbs are harder than they look on television. The Koppenberg at 22 per cent on wet cobblestones is a genuine test of bike-handling. Many riders dismount. There is no shame in it. Tyre choice matters — run 28mm or wider, drop your pressure to 5 bar or lower. And pace yourself. The first 100 kilometres are flat, and riders who burn their matches before the hellingen arrive have a miserable final 50 kilometres.
Paris-Roubaix Challenge
Run on the Saturday before the professional race. Three distances — 70 kilometres, 145 kilometres, or the full 170-kilometre route with all the major sectors. Yes, including the Trouee d'Arenberg. Yes, the actual one.
Let me be really clear about this: riding the Arenberg on a road bike is one of the most physically uncomfortable things you will do on a bicycle. The cobblestones are not like anything you have ridden before. They are enormous, uneven, and spaced in a way that creates a resonance frequency that shakes your entire body. Your hands will go numb. Your vision will blur. You will feel your fillings rattle.
It is also one of the most unforgettable experiences in cycling. Riding through that forest trench on the same cobbles that Cancellara and Boonen conquered — there is nothing else like it. Run the widest tyres your frame will accept. Consider tubeless. Tape your handlebars with double wrap. And bring two spare inner tubes.
Liege-Bastogne-Liege Challenge
The Ardennes sportive. 270 kilometres and 4,700 metres of climbing for the full distance. This is a long, hard day. The climbs are not as steep as Flanders, but they are relentless — by the time you reach the Redoute, you will have been riding for eight or nine hours and the gradient that looked manageable at kilometre 50 feels entirely different at kilometre 220.
The good news: there is a shorter option at 156 kilometres that still includes the major climbs. If you are not accustomed to riding 250-plus kilometres in a day, take the short route. There is no benefit to crawling the final 50 kilometres in the dark.
Gran Fondo Il Lombardia
The Italian sportive. Held separately from the professional race but covering the same roads around Lake Como. The climbing is serious — this is not a flat day with a few bumps — and the descents are technical. If you are uncomfortable descending on narrow, twisting roads with steep drop-offs, this one requires preparation. Practice descending before you go. Ride your brakes. Take the hairpins wider than you think you need to.
The reward is the scenery. Lake Como in October is staggeringly beautiful. The roads, the light, the colours — it is the kind of riding that makes you understand why people move to Italy.
Training for a Monument Sportive
The specificity matters. Each sportive demands something different, but the common thread is endurance. These are long days — six to ten hours in the saddle — and the biggest mistake amateur riders make is training for the climbs and forgetting about the distance. A 200-watt FTP means nothing if your body falls apart after 180 kilometres because you have never ridden that far in training.
Build your long ride. Progressively extend your weekend distance to at least 75 per cent of the event distance in the eight weeks before. Practice eating and drinking at race pace — fuelling failures end more sportives than fitness failures. For Flanders and Roubaix, find cobblestones or rough surfaces and practice riding them — the vibration and the bike-handling demands are markedly different from smooth tarmac.
And register early. The Tour of Flanders sportive sells out within days of opening. Roubaix and Liege fill quickly. Lombardia is slightly easier to get into but still limited. If riding a Monument is on your list, plan it 12 months in advance.
Why the Classics Matter
I could give you the historical argument — that these races are over a century old, that they predate the Tour de France, that they represent the original form of competitive cycling. And that is all true.
But here is the real reason the classics matter: they are better television, better storytelling, and better sport than almost anything else on the calendar.
A grand tour stage takes five hours and the decisive action happens in the last 20 minutes. A classic takes the same five hours and the tension builds from kilometre one. You can feel the race tightening. You can see the tactics unfold. The breakaway, the crosswinds, the positioning battles, the first attack on the first big climb, the response, the counter-attack, the crash that takes out a favourite, the solo rider who holds off the chasing group by 11 seconds across the line. All of it happens in a single afternoon.
The classics produce individual moments that stay in your memory for decades. Cancellara destroying the field on the Bosberg in 2010. Van der Poel attacking from 50 kilometres out at Flanders. Pogacar soloing the final 100 kilometres of a rain-soaked Liege. These are not statistical performances you read about on a website. They are visible, visceral, unforgettable acts of athletic brilliance that you watch and cannot quite believe you are seeing.
If you are new to professional cycling, start with the classics. They are easier to follow than a three-week stage race, they are packed into six weeks of concentrated action, and they will teach you more about the sport — the tactics, the physicality, the personalities, the geography — than any grand tour can. Grand tours are the marathon. The classics are the prize fight. Both are beautiful. But the prize fight does not need three weeks to tell its story.
If you want to go deeper into the sport — training, tactics, what the professionals actually do differently — come and join us in the Roadman Cycling community on Skool. We break down races, share training approaches, and talk about this stuff with people who are as obsessed with cycling as you are. No gatekeeping. Just riders who want to understand the sport better and ride their own bikes faster.
