Young guns come out blazing in Spain and UAE
One of our longer running bits here is the BCS Alert — a signal the blasts across the Podium Cafe Landscape alerting any and all members that a Belgian Climbing Sensation has been sighted. It’s very exciting! And certainly, it doesn’t happen enough, if you ask any Belgian.
That is what made Sunday’s rampage by Lotto-DSTNY’s Lennert Van Eetvelt such a notable event. The 22-year-old from Binkom, near Leuven, escaped from the peloton on the Jebel Hafeet, the final event of the UAE Tour, with enough of a gap to take the stage and the general classification, by two seconds over Decathlon-AG2R’s Ben O’Connor. It was powerful stuff:
Lennert Van Eetvelt did 6.28 ᵉW/Kg for 27:34 min on Jebel Hafeet. He did a similar effort in January in a Mallorcan race on Puig Major pushing 6:16 ᵉW/Kg for 32:41 min.
— Cycling Graphs (@CyclingGraphs) February 25, 2024
Those are big numbers! So is Van Eetvelt going to WIN THE TOUR DE FRANCE?!?! Probably not now, and not ever. But he might be kind of awesome regardless. The case for Van Eetvelt being a future star is that he’s 22, and if he hasn’t been talked about a lot before today, well, not every future star has to emerge at 19, do they? Physiologically and psychologically, a 22-year-old male is still evolving, and the pace at which young people grow doesn’t mean that much about where they will end up. I can’t find much about him on the internet right now beyond the avalanche of UAE Tour stories (sigh) but he said in interviews yesterday that he’s lived in the shadow of Remco Evenepoel — Old Man Remco, now 24 — and his palmares before turning pro were exciting but not blow-you-away stuff.
There is one result, though, that now looks incredibly interesting: the U23 Giro d’Italia from 2022. It was won by Leo Hayter, who is now with INEOS and hasn’t broken through at the top level yet (and also only 22), followed by our man Van Eetvelt at 2:12, followed by FDJ’s Lenny Martinez at 4:55. Hayter put five minutes into the field over the course of the course of two stages, the second and third, which he won, the latter being a multiple-mountain event including the back side of the Mortirolo. The kid grew wings that day I guess. But Van Eetvelt finished third, just behind Romain Gregoire and 49” up on Martinez.
Van Eetvelt then won the sixth…
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