For the past two years, Tadej Pogačar was the great disruptor at the men’s cobbled Classics, parachuting in to play the specialists at their own game, and beat them too. This time out, with the Slovenian focused on his build-up to the Giro d’Italia, the top billing is reserved for the familiar pairing of Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert.
Perhaps not since the days of Moser and Saronni has cycling been marked by such an enduring, all-encompassing duel. In all seasons, on (almost) every terrain, Van Aert and Van der Poel appeared to be locked in a seemingly never-ending contest for supremacy. Like Messi and Ronaldo, praise for one almost inevitably carries a tacit admonishment of the other.
They can never seem to escape one another. Even when Van der Poel wins aboard a mountain bike or when Van Aert shines in the high mountains, conversation inevitably circles back again to what that performance might mean about their relative merits and their relative legacies. Even beyond the mud of the cyclocross circuit and the cobbles of the Flemish Ardennes, they serve as one another’s yardstick.
And yet, by one metric, Van der Poel has pulled ahead of his old rival over the past two seasons. Van Aert was the first of the pair to win a Monument when he claimed the pandemic-delayed Milan-San Remo in 2020, but then Van der Poel equalled the score two months later by outsprinting him at the Tour of Flanders.
Although Van Aert has enjoyed regular Classics success since then – winning E3 Harelbeke twice, Gent-Wevelgem, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne and Amstel Gold Race – he has failed to add another Monument to his palmarès. Illness and ill fortune haven’t helped – witness his puncture at Paris-Roubaix last year – but Van Aert has seen the biggest prizes escape his grasp in recent years.
Van der Poel, on the other hand, has increasingly become the man for the big occasion, bringing his Monuments tally to four and winning last year’s Glasgow World Championships to boot. It seemed unlikely when he squandered winning hands at both the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix in 2021, but Van der Poel has developed into the peloton’s most consistent and nerveless finisher in the biggest one-day races.
At Milan-San Remo on Saturday, meanwhile, Van der Poel showed that he can tilt the balance even in the Monuments he doesn’t win. Jasper Philipsen’s victory on the Via Roma owed so much to his Alpecin-Deceunick teammate’s tagging of Pogačar on…
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