Losing, a permanent condition in bike racing, comes in many forms. On Wednesday at Dwars door Vlaanderen, Wout van Aert's Visma team plumbed new depths and suffered one of the more embarrassing defeats you'll see all season. They only could lose this big, this greedily, because they tried to win this big, this defiantly, which I think is something like admirable.
It all started after they'd rode themselves into a theoretically unloseable position. They led the peloton in reeling back the day's early breakaway with 90 kilometers left, which sparked a frenzy of attacks. Mads Pedersen tried something and failed, a small group of riders tried something and succeeded and then failed, as Van Aert and three teammates broke clear from the peloton and leapt up to join and then shred that front group. It was an impressive display of team strength from a team whose capacity for such moves wasn't as certain as it once had been. The trio unlatched everyone save for the young American rider Neilson Powless, and they raced on with nothing but 55 kilometers of clear pasture ahead of them. Who was going to catch them? Intermarché? Groupama? The chase had talent, but never organization. Also, the three Jumbo guys were all known cobble-eaters, only liable to be followed by especially rugged riders.
With this dominant position in mind, racing off to a disaster we will detail shortly, let us consider Visma's status within the pro peloton and their ambitions this Spring. They are still extremely strong—Matteo Jorgenson defended his Paris–Nice title, hot shit teenager Matthew Brennan is racing like a madman, and Jonas Vingegaard's gotten on the board—though they've had a down year; Vingegaard has only barely gotten on the board and their top sprinter Olav Kooij just broke his collarbone. On the cobbles, they are still the team everyone stares at most often, waiting for them to take action and define the shape of a race, but all that collective strength has not resulted in as many wins as they had in either their world-conquering 2023 or their solid if ultimately less fruitful 2024. This is due both to the rise of UAE and the travails of their premier classics rider, Wout van Aert.
It's not all his fault. Exactly one year ago, Van Aert was flying into cycling's Holy Week when he got caught up in a mass crash, leaving him with a broken rib, sternum, and collarbone, forcing the talented and then-untested Jorgenson to assume leadership responsibilities (which he did with flair), and allowing his arch-rival Mathieu van der Poel to win both cobbled monuments basically for free by a combined four minutes. Van Aert scuffled through the Tour de France then returned to the Vuelta a España and dominated the field before crashing out again with a knee injury. More important than the injuries was the fact that Van Aert had spent the meat of the season fighting back into top-end shape, and went nuts at the final Grand Tour of the season.
This year, Van der Poel looks as strong as he ever has, and the season's most significant early skirmishes have been defined by Tadej Pogacar's galactic ambitions, Van der Poel's strength and racing genius, and Pedersen somehow matching them both, at least in kind. Van Aert certainly has shown the talent to hang with and dispose of all those guys before in various contexts, and even an imperfect Visma still has the juice to affect races. It's still such a profound bummer that a rider of Van Aert's talent, a Belgian rider at that, has not won a Flanders or Roubaix, and it would be very odd if his career ends without him lifting either trophy. The issue is that peak form becomes increasingly harder to reach following each successive big crash after age 30, and as strong as Van Aert looked on Wednesday to set up what would be the winning move, he looked equally unable to capitalize on it. Let's return to Dwars.
The tactic when you have a 2-on-1 against an opponent in a breakaway is extremely simple: Take turns attacking off the front, forcing the lone rider to chase down every escape until their legs crap out and fall off, and whichever rider is lucky enough to be the one to attack last wins, while their teammate wins the sprint for second and celebrates, thrilled for their team's victory. That's an even simpler proposition when you have three riders. Van Aert and Visma, however, decided that they would risk humiliation in order to maximize the chances that van Aert specifically, and not any one of their trio generally, would win.
So instead of taking turns roasting Powless—a strong rider on the cobbles and a wily opportunist, exactly the wrong sort of person to give this opportunity to—Tiesj Benoot and Jorgenson worked together to hold off the chasing pack in order to set up a sprint between Van Aert and Powless. Still, I expected van Aert to win, and more importantly they expected him to win. Hell, Powless expected Van Aert to win, saying after the race that he thought about ceding the win and dropping back to help with the sprint for fourth, but no, they let him just get to the line for free. Inevitably, it was Powless who came around Van Aert and won the sprint with shocking ease. The Visma riders expressed their disgust, with a facepalm from Benoot, a dejected hunch from Van Aert, and a look of pain from Jorgenson, before Powless even crossed the line.
"I'm fully responsible for this loss," Van Aert said after the finish. "It was me that made the call we would go for a sprint and I asked Matteo and Tiesj to just control in the final and bring me to the line."
"I wanted this victory so badly, especially after all the criticism and bad luck I've been through last year," he continued. "I would say for once I was thinking about myself ... that's a huge mistake, it's not who I am and that's why I'm extremely disappointed." He's right to take the blame but also right to give himself the credit for how rare a moment of selfishness like this is. For all the snakebittenness of Van Aert's career over the past two seasons, he's been an incredible teammate. He might actually be at his best not as a race finisher, but as a set-up man, someone whose climbing legs actually distinguish him and set him above Van der Poel, a rider who's basically made Jasper Philipsen's career, as the hypothetical best in the peloton. He can still win stuff, and I think his desire to take Dwars one year after it ruined a great shot at one of the Holy Week monuments is more forgivable than costing his team a win is unforgivable.
This sucks for both rider and team, is my point, but it's not the end of the world, and being strong enough to kill the race with your buddies is impressive, even if it ended so poorly. The question is at what level can he still win stuff. Everyone remembers, of course, that Ian Stannard did to Quick Step at Omloop in 2015 what Powless did to Visma this year. Few, however, would recall that Zdeněk Štybar won Strade Bianche the next weekend.
