As the countdown to the 2024 season gathers pace, Cyclingnews looks at some of the key storylines that will define the coming year in cycling.
Wout van Aert can do just about everything, but that doesn’t mean he can have it all. On the eve of the 2024 season, the Belgian has been faced with tough choices.
Even in an era bedecked with the versatile gifts of men like Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), nobody has quite the same level of dexterity as Van Aert, who glides with such striking ease between registers, on and off road. The familiar, graceful pedal stroke is a constant across the calendar, in cyclocross and in bunch sprints, amid the cobbles and hills of the Classics and on mountain passes of the Tour.
And yet, as he approaches his 30th birthday, it’s still hard to shake off the sense that Van Aert’s hefty palmarès somehow does not quite add up to the sum of his variegated talents. He has already amassed more victories of real quality than most riders manage in a lifetime – among them nine Tour de France stages, Milan-San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem, Strade Bianche, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and two wins at E3 Harelbeke, not to mention three Cyclocross World Championships titles – but at times his career still feels defined by the races he hasn’t yet won.
That is partly because of the unrelenting and often unrealistic expectation of the cycling fan, but largely due to the achievements of Pogačar and his eternal rival Van der Poel over the past three years. The Monument may be a relatively modern construct, but in the 21st century, it has become the gold standard for measuring the achievements of one-day riders, and Van Aert’s account is light.
Pogačar has now won five Monuments, while Van der Poel reached a running tally of four thanks to his victories at Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix last Spring. For good measure, the Dutchman added the Road World Championships title at Van Aert’s expense in Glasgow, and he finished the year as the inaugural winner of the Vélo d’Or for one-day riders.
Van Aert, by contrast, still has ‘only’ one Monument to his name. As the years have passed since his 2020 Milan-San Remo victory, that statistic has begun to look more like an accusation than an achievement.
The Belgian was, by a distance, the peloton’s outstanding rider when pro cycling reopened for business after the first COVID-19 lockdown, and his victory against Julian Alaphilippe at that August…
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