It is often said that hindsight is 20/20, but when Filippo Ganna decided to finish second in the Milan-San Remo race, he did not know how to deal with the result. The approximately 300-km race was, as always, a series of split-second decisions.

""Angry" or "satisfied" ...... I'm still in limbo," Ganna replied when asked how he felt in the mixed zone. 'I haven't analyzed it yet.'

The Ineos Grenadiers racers appeared to have played the most difficult role, resisting the expected onslaught of Tadei Pogacar on Poggio, but when the gradient slowed near the top, Mathieu van der Pol sprinted away from the four-man lead group.

The Ineos rider confidently locked onto Pogacar's wheel on the steepest slope, but hesitated as Van der Pol surged up. Ganna tried to leave the job of closing the gap to the Slovenian rider or Wout Van Art. And the moment passed.

Van der Pol jumped into the descent clutching a small lead, but he made up for this advantage by sprinting out of every hairpin curve on the drop into San Remo. He reached Via Roma with a 15-second lead, and Ganna finished second, ahead of Van Aal and Pogacar.

"I wanted to follow with my head, but I didn't know if my legs were ready," Ganna said of his response to Van der Pol's game-changing attack. 'I didn't want to go after him, I wanted to see what would happen on the downhills and flats. Maybe if I had the magic 8-ball, I could have looked inside: ...... I'll try to follow next time."

He said.

The hesitation seemed even more understandable when it was revealed that van der Pol's time in Poggio (unofficial record according to La Gazzetta dello Sport: 5:38) was a new record, beating the 5:46 set by Giorgio Furlan in 1994 "If I could go back and rewind, it would be a challenge," he said. If I could go back and rewind, I could have tried," Ganna said.

Ganna was aware of his downhill limitations and preferred to let Van Aat make up the pace on the descent to Sanremo. When the road flattened out in the last 2km, it was already clear that only bad luck in the closing stages could prevent Van der Pol from winning the monument for the third time in his career.

Ganna had hoped beforehand to reach that point in the lead group and repeat Fabian Cancellara's 2008 victory. He said, "Once I got into a small group after the downhill, I was going to attack like Cancellara.

Instead, Ganna stuck with Van Aert and Pogachar and headed down Via Roma. He said, "Three big riders chased us, but in the end we didn't work well together on the downhills.

Ganna will be Ineos' outright leader after Tom Pidcock withdrew from Milan-San Remo due to concussion. The Italian paid tribute to his teammate's efforts during the final 60 km along the coast. 'I couldn't see anything but Luke Rowe's rear wheel and his teammates. They carried me from Imperia to Poggio in a kind of bubble."

On the other hand, on the climb, Ganna was one of three who resisted the inevitable acceleration of the poggacar and rode as contracted. Sports director Matteo Tosatto suggested that Ganna was not the only one who was blindsided by Van der Pol's furious attack afterwards.

"I had told him to watch out for Pogacar's acceleration, but Van der Pol went ...... Filippo was on Pogacar's wheel and it was up to Pogacar to pack it in there. Filippo was afraid to go downhill because he wasn't very good at it."

Tosatto was reluctant to say that Ganna should have tried to follow Van der Pol -- "We must not forget that Pippo took the lead for the first time in Poggio.

"When you look at Pippo's final sprint and his legs, maybe there are small regrets," she said. But this second place is something to be happy about and I head to Belgium with a lot of confidence."

Ganna has already taken second place at the Vuelta a San Juan and the 2023 Volta ao Algarve, and won the European title in Team Pursuit. Saturday was decisive in small details, but the overall picture looks really encouraging.