So that others would have to chase Oss, and Sagan could just follow wheels, which he’s very, very good at.
VanAert didn’t do much different to what Sagan did in 2017. Make the move on the Poggio, descend like a madman, take your pills even when the others in the escape stop, keep the speed up enough to hold the chasers off, and be unafraid to lead out the sprint. The only difference was Kwiatkowski making the bridge.
Sagan might still have a San Remo win in him.
He was doing what everybody told him here to do, to be invisible all race, to rely on that race goes to sprint, and to try to beat everybody there. And actually he did a great job there.
All sprinters were gone, just the power of peloton was not good enough to catch those 2 on the finish line. He is simply not good enough
yet (or anymore) to follow Alaf in Poggio.
The difference to Bergen is that Bergen Sagan would be able to help peloton to catch those two as Alaf descanting was awful and they were catchable.
Unfortunately, we will not see Sagan in an important one-day race anymore this year, so we will not be able to tell whether this kind of Sagan is due to his preparation timing or he is already worn out and we should use on the fact that he is not first-tier favorite for SB, MSR, GW, RVV, PR anymore. Is he worn out only mentally (motivation to kill yourselves in winter preparation although having an 8 digit number in account) or also physically. For this answer, we will have to wait for next season as he will be pretty good at GT short stages that are good for his explosive power. ( + the fact that two fastest sprinters are gone and one is in his team)
As for OSS I hoped to see the moves like this from him in cobbles but have never seen yet. This was really not necessary. Nowadays
nobody is able to escape peloton before Poggio. It is just a waste of energy. (we will have to wait for Remco in few years
)