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It wasn’t quite Diego Maradona in Foxborough, but it was a message of defiance all the same. “Ik moet juist niks!” Wout van Aert shouted into the lens of the television camera as he slowed to a halt after winning E3 Saxo Bank in a three-up sprint: “I don’t have to prove anything.
Van Aert has raised the bar higher than most in recent seasons, but that doesn’t inoculate him from criticism when he fails to clear the required height. A bout of illness in February saw the Jumbo-Visma rider make a slower start to the season than anticipated. It’s all relative – he was third in Milan-San Remo, after all – but the chatter in Belgium was steadily rising all week ahead of this definitive dress rehearsal for the Tour of Flanders.
“Wout urgently needs to win a race, otherwise he will get nervous,” former Lotto manager Marc Sergeant suggested in Friday morning’s Het Nieuwsblad, a thought echoed by Tom Boonen on Sporza’s Wielerclub Wattage podcast.
“You need a victory in Harelbeke for yourself to be able to live peacefully ahead of the Ronde.” Boonen, whose three Tour of Flanders victories were all preceded by E3 wins, knows of what he speaks.
Above all, perhaps, Van Aert – condemned to spend his entire career locked in an unending duel against a longstanding rival – has spent the last week hearing constant reminders that Mathieu van der Poel now leads him 3-1 in Monument victories after his triumph at Milan-San Remo. It followed a defeat at Van der Poel’s hands at the Cyclocross World Championships, a series the Dutchman now leads 5-3.
At the E3 Saxo Classic on Friday, Van Aert occasionally looked in difficulty when the road climbed, most obviously when he was briefly dropped on the Oude Kwaremont by Tadej Pogačar and Van der Poel.
“It was definitely the hardest moment of the race for me,” said Van Aert, but he still made it to Harelbeke in their company and then saw them both off in the sprint to win his second successive E3. His cry past the finish line, he explained, was instinctive.
“I’ve been asked a million times, in basically every interview in the last two months. And if people know me, these things motivate me, and sometimes I can’t help myself, and I threw it out there,” Van Aert told the reporters who huddled around him in the press room afterwards. “When you win a sprint like this one, there’s a lot of emotions going through you. It was just what popped up in my mind. I could finally answer with my legs…
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