Eli Iserbyt celebrated his Pauwels Sauzen-Bingoal team becoming Pauwels Sauzen-Cibel Clementines with a victory Wednesday at GP Sven Nys, the fifth round of the 2024-2025 X2O Badkamers Trofee in Baal, Belgium. It was a race Mathieu van der Poel had to skip through injury. His first win since the Antwerp World Cup meant that Iserbyt’s lead atop the classification ballooned, and with key riders in the overall title race missing, Toon Aerts moved up to second overall from fourth. Gunnar Holmgren was top Canadian in 17th.
Preliminaries
After the Herentals round, Iserbyt assumed the series lead from Round 1 victor Lars van der Haar by 41 seconds. However, Iserbyt’s back problems has stymied his season aspirations and van der Haar was skipping the next two rounds of the series. Thibau Nys, Niels Vandeputte and Michael Vanthourenhout—the latter also missing Baal due to illness—all took top honours in the other X2O races. Laurens Sweeck was coming off Monday’s Superprestige win. As of Wednesday, the Baloise-Trek Lions were officially redubbed the Baloise-Glowi Lions.
Gunnar Holmgren, Cody Scott, Cameron Jette and Fabian Merino were the Canadian entrants.
While Daan Soete enjoyed a great start, Nys couldn’t click in at the gun and was far down at the beginning of Lap 1. Then he flew over the handlebars. Soete led the long string, Iserbyt, Pim Ronhaar and Aerts near the front. Nys surfed up to ninth. Emiel Verstrynge led a pack of 10 over the line.
Ronhaar seized the reins at the start of Lap 2 and led Verstrynge into the whoops downhill section, a little gap back to Iserbyt, Aerts, Nys and Jente Michels. Aerts met a rut he didn’t like and laid it down. Iserbyt and Nys put the other chasers into their rear view mirrors.
At the beginning of Lap 3 the two leaders grabbed new bikes. Nys deftly grabbed a new shoe. Iserbyt lit out after the duo on his own, Nys in Position 3. Iserbyt had five seconds to make up.
🚵🇧🇪 | 10 punten voor de schoenwissel van Thibau Nys. Als je knippert mis je het 👀👀 #GPSvenNys
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On the middle lap of 7, Iserbyt crept closer and closer. He finally made the junction. Nys and Aerts had aspirations to link up with the new trio, trailing by 10 seconds at the line. Scott was 27th at this point.
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