The idea was to outflank and outnumber Mathieu van der Poel, but in the finale of Gent-Wevelgem, Mads Pedersen still faced something akin to a modern labour of Hercules, namely a head-to-head contest with the world champion.
Pedersen’s Lidl-Trek squad had raced with aggression and cohesion all afternoon, placing three men in the front group of seven that formed after the first ascent of the Kemmelberg, but a plan can only bring a team so far at a race like this. Come the last hour or so of racing, Pedersen had to find his own way past a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
If Pedersen was daunted by the task, he didn’t show it. On the final haul up the Kemmelberg, he opted to set the tempo himself, dialling up the pace to distance their last remaining breakaway companion Laurence Pithie (Groupama-FDJ). Above all, Pedersen wanted to do just enough to dissuade Van der Poel from launching an acceleration of his own.
“I didn’t want to try to drop Mathieu,” Pedersen said when he took a seat in the media room afterwards. “First of all, I don’t believe I would have been able to do that, and second, if I had managed to drop him, I’m pretty sure he would have sat up and waited for the peloton. Then they’d have been there chasing with the whole team, and that wouldn’t have made sense at all.
“The last time on the Kemmel, I didn’t look back. I just wanted to make it hard enough so he wouldn’t attack. I remembered his attack from [the Tour of Flanders] last year, and it definitely put me on the limit, so I wanted to avoid that. I didn’t know if he was fully on the limit or not. I know I was on the limit, and I was just hoping he had a hard time there as well.”
Van der Poel would later reveal that he was struggling to hold Pedersen’s wheel at that point, and the Dutchman confessed that he already had a sinking feeling about his prospects in a two-up sprint 35km later. Pedersen wasn’t to know that at the time, of course, and the two struck a common accord over the other side of the Kemmel. Having rid themselves of the dangerous Pithie, they were now content to share the workload on the flat road to Wevelgem.
“We kind of asked each other if we were happy with the situation and if we would work together or start to attack each other,” Pedersen explained of the brief parley that was captured by the television cameras.
“It would have…
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