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Thursday, March 28, 2024 at 8:00 AM
Analysis It was the last match to finalize the week of truth. In one fell swoop, the months of work of Wout van Aert and Jasper Stuyven are ruined. While Mads Pedersen and Binam Girmay will probably start their Tour of Flanders badly damaged due to the same massive crash in Dwars door Vlaanderen next Sunday.
The Ninoofsesteenweg is the main road towards Ronse. In cycling, this three-lane N-road is best known as the only descent to get to the foot of the Kanarieberg. The riders race down here at speeds of about eighty to ninety kilometers per hour to get into the best possible position for the climb.
Too dangerous for the Tour of Flanders, the organization ruled after a massive crash last year where outsiders Matej Mohoric and Biniam Girmay were the main victims at the time. No intervention was made in Dwars door Vlaanderen, because the organization assumed that in this semi-classic there would be much less stress in the peloton towards the Kanarieberg. A fatal miscalculation.
Race director Scott Sunderland explained in HLN this week why the Kanarieberg and Kortekeer have been removed from the Tour of Flanders route. On the way to both slopes, the riders turn at high speeds from the main road to a narrow climb. The pressure to choose a position in the peloton is very great. “We don’t want anyone to lose the Tour due to bad luck,” Sunderland emphasized.
A statement that he now gets back like a boomerang. The heavy fall that forced Wout van Aert (fractured collarbone and broken ribs) and Jasper Stuyven (fractured collarbone) to end their Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix and that Mads Pedersen and Biniam Girmay probably had to start these Monuments badly damaged, is firstly very sad for the riders themselves and for their teams. But these top prices have also been dismantled by this horror crash.
Most of the team leaders involved did not point to organizer Flanders Classics. “Falls can happen anywhere. Unfortunately, that risk is part of our sport,” emphasized Grischa Niermann of Visma | Lease a Bike. “We don’t race too many races with Wout towards the Ronde and Roubaix. You have to connect the dots somewhere. This can also happen in Harelbeke, Ghent-Wevelgem or during training.”
The situation remains that some passages are very dangerous and are actually unnecessarily included in a route. The descent to the Kanarieberg was included in a survey last week HLN called by some riders as the most dangerous point of the Flemish classics.
Japser Stuyven: “Always a stressful moment there. The peloton is often still large and there is a lot of dirt and gravel on the side of the road surface.” Jasper Philipsen: “The speed is extremely high in the descent to the Kanarieberg. You really don’t want to fall there.”
Sports director Aike Visbeek of Intermarché-Wanty saw his leader Girmay fall here for the second time in twelve months. An initial scan in the hospital showed that there were no broken bones, but that his ribs had suffered a serious blow. However, there remains a prospect of the Tour of Flanders. Visbeek did not only point to the descent to the Kanarieberg. “There are four descents where you turn from a wide track at eighty kilometers per hour into a very narrow street towards a climb. That is asking for misery.”
Visbeek immediately made a statement: if the Dwars door Vlaanderen route remains the same, he will not let his most important riders take the same risks with a view to the Ronde and Roubaix as they do now. And that thought will certainly prevail among more teams now. More than in the past, ‘modern’ cycling is mainly about major agreements.
Van Aert chose to skip the Cyclo-Cross World Championships, Strade Bianche and Milan-San Remo in order to have that extra percentage in the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix through a later altitude training camp. A mission that failed, without him ever knowing whether this approach would have worked. Especially because we haven’t seen the best Wout van Aert this spring (yet). For the second time in three years (in 2022 due to corona), he will miss ‘Flanders Most Beautiful’ as a Flemish. The blow will hit him very hard. Although he has already shown in previous disappointments that he has enormous resilience.
Jasper Stuyven before the start of Dwars door Vlaanderen – photo: Cor Vos
While Stuyven will be very disappointed that he was in the form of his life, after a strong performance in Milan-San Remo and second place in the E3 Saxo Bank Classic, and was looking forward to the two most important cobblestone classics more than ever.
It is a bull’s eye to say that Mathieu van der Poel made a good choice to skip Dwars door Vlaanderen. The two most important blocks that could make a stand against ‘MVDP’ were dismantled by one fall. Visma | In addition to the loss of Van Aert, Lease a Bike also has to deal with Christophe Laporte, Dylan van Baarle and Jan Tratnik, who are not optimally fit. Nevertheless, it ended in Waregem with Matteo Jorgenson and Tiesj Benoot in places one and four.
In terms of width, Lidl-Trek to Dwars van Vlaanderen made the strongest impression on the Flemish roads, but the American team suffered the most victims in the terrible fall with Pedersen, Stuyven and Alex Kirsch.
It is clear that the competition will put the weight of the race in the Tour of Flanders in the hands of Mathieu van der Poel’s team even more than before. Normally Alpecin-Deceuninck should be able to control the match, but after the horror crash on the Ninoofsesteenweg, no competing team in Antwerp will start with the scenario that they want to enter the final with ‘MVDP’. As a result, it could be a very strange race on Easter Sunday.
