The idea for this image came from the race itself. Milano-Sanremo is often decided on the very last climb, the Poggio, which comes just a few kilometers before the finish, and I wanted to be at the top of it to catch that moment where the race so often breaks open, with one single image.

This is the only picture in the exhibition that wasn't shot on large format. I had driven to the race with my analog medium format camera and the plan to make one frame, but when we got up to the Poggio I ran into trouble loading the film and couldn't get the camera to work at all. Luckily I had my digital camera with me too, so I decided to make the image with that instead. It was the first bike race I had ever been to, and between the noise of the helicopters and the hundred or so motorbikes that come through ahead of the riders, I had no real idea when the race would actually reach us. We weren't close enough to the course either, so I held the camera up for about five minutes and shot almost blind. Looking back, the analog frame probably wouldn't have come to anything anyway, not with how little I knew going in.

This was the first image I made with the clear thought that I wanted to show as much of the whole thing as possible in one frame, and it pushed me toward doing exactly that on large format afterwards. For me it isn't a lesser picture just because it's digital, because the camera is only a means to an end. I get much more out of the analog process and the planning it forces on me, but what really matters is the thought behind the image and why I want to document something. If the result leaves me with the same feeling, how I got there doesn't matter to me. At the exhibition almost nobody guessed that this was the digital one, which I found pretty funny. It also shows the exact moment of the decisive attack, and so far it stays the last edition where a rider went solo over the Poggio and held the lead all the way to the finish.