Fielding the winners of the past two editions, Matt Goss (2011) and Simon Gerrans (2012), Orica-GreenEDGE was looking to complete a hat-trick of Milan-San Remo wins yesterday but the weather sought to wreck the tactics of the defending champions who were unable to overpower the merciless conditions.

"When the boys got on the bus after the race was stopped in Ovada to bypass the Turchino, it was clear that the race had gone for 10-15 km too long," team director Neil Stephens told GreenEdgecycling.com. "We were in really bad shape. The boys were shaking and shivering. I heard from a few other teams that they had riders that were shaking so badly they had fallen off their bikes.”

"I wanted to tell them not to worry about it - to get off and stay off the bike. Instead, I had to do the opposite. I had to give them warm tea and food, encourage them to take warm showers and get them mentally prepared to go out there again. It was hard on my team and hard on the whole peloton."

Matt Goss had basically excluded himself from victory after crashing just before arriving at the neutral zone in Ovada and after rushing aboard the team bus it soon became clear that his injury would not allow him to carry on racing.

"Gossy [Matt Goss] had been involved in a crash about ten minutes prior to arriving back at the team bus. He hurt his leg, and we realized it was getting worse the longer he sat around. Between the constant changes and Gossy's fall, there wasn’t much tactic left. It became a race for the opportunists. At the end of our meeting, I said to them ‘Someone is going to win - why can’t it be us?’ and then I sent them back out there."

Deprived of Matt Goss, Orica-GreenEDGE focused all their attention on Simon Gerrans but he lost contact with the leaders on the penultimate climb of the Cipressa, thus ending a quite miserable and incident-ridden day for Orica-GreenEDGE.