You don’t just invent bicycle races. They take years of planning and decades of execution. Races become tales and tales become legends. For a bicycle race to enter the calendar is one thing; to cement itself in the velocipedic vernacular quite another. Yet that’s exactly what the Strade Bianche has done in less than a decade. Or has it?

Although it might seem counterintuitive in the age of amateur spin-offs from professional events, the Gran Fondo Strade Bianche, whose starting gun I now anxiously await, is actually the parent of the pro race, a 1.HC category race that started in 2007 and has since become one of the early-season cherries. The gran fondo predates the pro event by 10 years, and over the course of time morphed into two races: L’Eroica, which is restricted to bicycles made before 1987, and this, a 124km replica of the pro race taking in 22.4km of sterrati, the dusty chalk roads that scar the vineyards and fields throughout one of Italy’s most cherished regions, Tuscany.

While today belongs to the 2,500-strong field currently held captive in start pens, the pro race held yesterday belonged to a decisive Lizzie Armitstead and a thrilling Fabian Cancellara. The reigning women’s World Champion took the honours three seconds to the good, but it was the Swiss Cancellara who truly stole the show, punching hard up the final climb to pip an explosive Zdenek Stybar and an exhausted Peter Sagan at the finish in Siena’s Piazza il Campo.

As a spectator yesterday it was heart-in-themouth stuff. As a participant today it’s done a marvellous job of stoking up the butterflies. Loose gravel roads with the prediction of bad weather? Check. Twenty-five millimetre tyres on a flyweight road bike? Jury’s still out.

He is Spartacus