I wrote before the Tour of Flanders that if Pogacar could drop Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert then it would be something huge. And he did it. What he achieved today, the way he rode, will go down in history.
For Tadej, the harder it gets, the easier it gets. What I mean by that is, when it’s a hard race, the strength of the strongest rider will show, and the others will blow earlier. The better you are, the less you have to worry. If you are tired, the others are more tired. Mentally, you need to be strong, but the harder it is for everyone, the easier it gets for you.
This Tour of Flanders was just hard all the time. It was a crazy race, right from the start – even before the start, with the terrible weather in the last days. Then you do the first 100km in two hours and everyone is on the limit when they should be letting a breakaway go.
The wind was stronger than expected and that had an influence. It looked so nervous in the bunch, and the first part of the race was just a crash festival. The first hours were just so intense, and this definitely has an impact later on, especially when you’re racing for 274km – longer than usual for a Tour of Flanders.
The second thing is that once the race is already hard, Tadej makes it harder by accelerating from the bottom to the top of every key climb. This is a Tour de France winner and he needs to use every single inch of uphill to his advantage, to turn it into a watts-per-kilo game as much as possible. The Oude Kwaremont is the prime example – the longest climb in the race. They did it three times and there was barely a cobblestone on which he wasn’t attacking.
I definitely expected Tadej to go full gas from the bottom to the top to drop everybody on the last lap, but I didn’t expect him to go straight away on the second time up. Given the situation of the race, he sort of had to.
That dangerous big group had gone away and gained three minutes. I thought ‘surely it’s not over’. I actually said out loud, ‘no, it cannot be over’. Then UAE moved up and went full gas on the Kwaremont, the race explodes, and Tadej is gone. When Laporte joined him, the race looked super interesting – he was on the front foot but it was a gamble.
In the end, it comes back and Tadej still does the forcing on Koppenberg, Wout drops on Kruisberg, Mathieu drops on Kwaremont, and it’s over. What more can you say? There is simply no argument that the strongest guy won the race. He is the deserving winner of the Tour of…
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