Matteo Jorgenson already knew it hadn’t been his team’s day, he didn’t need an on-the-nose metaphor to hammer home the point at the end of the E3 Saxo Classic. He got it anyway.
On crossing the finish line in fifth place, 1:50 behind winner Mathieu van der Poel, Jorgenson longed only for the warmth of the Visma-Lease A Bike team bus, but there was another episode of ill fortune before he reached that relative luxury. As the American soft-pedalled through the drizzle towards his sanctuary, another rider changed direction abruptly in front of him and brought him crashing to the ground.
“It was insult to injury more than anything,” Jorgenson smiled when he emerged from the bus a little later. “I had a very light crash, I was behind a rider from another team who didn’t look back and he just turned to his bus immediately without looking and he took me out, but we were going 15kph so I’m fine.”
The final hour of the E3 Saxo Classic had been played out in the spitting rain and dank gloom so typical of this neck of the woods at this time of the year. Jacques Brel would probably have knocked a song out of an afternoon where a grey grimness gradually seemed to wash over every inch of the Flemish Ardennes. Jorgenson had to make do with fifth place and a nasty chill.
“I was just sitting in the wheels, and I got super cold,” said Jorgenson, who spent the run-in as part of a chasing group behind the lone leader Van der Poel and his Visma teammate Wout van Aert, who was stuck in a lonesome pursuit of his old rival. He could only watch when Jasper Stuyven (Lidl-Trek) jumped across to Van Aert in the closing kilometres.
“I was getting colder and colder and colder, and my legs just seized. I couldn’t follow Stuyven, and I was on his wheel when he went. I went myself but I could barely pedal, I was just frozen.”
Visma-Lease a Bike’s race had been an ill-starred one from the outset. European champion Christophe Laporte was already absent through illness, and they proceeded to lose Per Strand Hagenes to an early fall. Dylan van Baarle went down in the same crash and the Dutchman champion later endured at least two mechanical mishaps. Tiesj Benoot crashed before the Kapelberg and then Van Aert himself fell on the Paterberg, precisely as Van der Poel was hurling himself into his race-winning offensive.
“It was mostly just a day of bad luck for our team,” Jorgenson said. “We had a…
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