The Flemish Ardennes is the kind of place where a misstep can quickly spiral into a mistake. If Tadej Pogačar didn’t know that before, he certainly realised as much after his first race in the area in the 2022 Dwars door Vlaanderen.
When the Slovenian was loose in his positioning ahead of Berg Ten Houte that afternoon, Mathieu van der Poel didn’t need a second invitation to spark the winning move. Pogačar, meanwhile, would never see the front of the race again, instead spending the next 70km in a ferocious but ultimately futile chase amid the lonesome lanes and steeples of Flanders. He would reach Waregem over two minutes down in 10th place. Welcome to the neighbourhood.
For years, the apparent chaos of the cobbled Classics, where the gentlest flap of a butterfly’s wings always carries the residual threat of a tornado, had all but dissuaded Tour de France contenders from daring to sample the delights of the Flemish Spring. Vincenzo Nibali’s Tour of Flanders cameo in 2018 was notable, but even his respectable outing there felt close to the upper limit of what a man with designs on the yellow jersey that same year could reasonably hope to achieve.
The normal rules, however, don’t seem to apply to Pogačar. Riders of his physique, so received wisdom told us, shouldn’t be able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Van der Poel, and yet he dominated the 2022 Tour of Flanders with the Dutchman before somehow contriving to finish fourth in a two-up sprint in Oudenaarde.
Like the error of positioning at Dwars door Vlaanderen, that Ronde sprint was another stark lesson for Pogačar, but the UAE Team Emirates rider gives the impression of being a quick learner. On Friday, when he found himself contesting the 2023 E3 Saxo Classic with Van der Poel and Wout van Aert, Pogačar understood that his only, faint hope of an upset in the sprint was to open his effort from distance rather than get lulled again into trying to accelerate from a near dead start.
More strikingly, when Pogačar had briefly taken his eye off the ball on the Taaienberg 80km from the finish, he moved immediately to remedy the situation himself rather than rely on the circumstances of the race to do it for him. When Van der Poel and Van Aert surged clear there, Pogačar swiftly sewed the race back together. It was an error, of course, but UAE Team Emirates directeur sportif Fabio Baldato insisted it hadn’t been a costly one, unlike at last year’s Dwars door Vlaanderen.
“For a moment,…
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