Coughing and cursing was the soundtrack as the finishers of Gent-Wevelgem trudged their way through the mixed zone on Menenstraat, where the muddied faces and haunted stares already told the story of nigh-on six hours of racing amid driving rain and wind.
Most, shivering against the cold, understandably opted to keep rolling towards their rest aboard the team buses parked further down the street. Despite another subdued outing from their Soudal-QuickStep team, however, Yves Lampaert and Tim Merlier lingered amid the microphones and cameras and put their day in words, perhaps out of a sense of duty to those who had covered their squad on happier days.
For the fourth time in a cobbled Classic this season, the spoils had fallen to Jumbo-Visma, with Wout van Aert ceding victory to his teammate Christophe Laporte after a 55km solo break. The highest Soudal-QuickStep finisher, by contrast was Merlier, who came home over two minutes down in 14th place.
On the results sheet, Gent-Wevelgem marked a very minor improvement on Friday’s E3 Harelbeke, where Lampaert took 16th place, but the overall performance was entirely of a piece with Soudal-QuickStep’s anonymous Classics campaign to this point. Until recently, all roads to victory in this part of the world ran through Patrick Lefevere’s team. These days, that mantle has passed firmly to Jumbo-Visma.
“I think they are a different league at the moment. They are really super strong,” directeur sportif Tom Steels told Cyclingnews outside the Soudal-QuickStep bus.
Steels, twice a winner of Gent-Wevelgem, knows the intricacies of this event better than most, and he knew from early on that his charges wouldn’t be able to race on the front foot, which is always the preferred stance in this corner of the world.
“We have to ride defensively, we don’t have the power to ride really in the offense,” he admitted. “The first time up the Kemmel was not good, we had to chase there, and when you do that, you lose a lot of power for later, and then every time you go up the Kemmel afterwards, you lose some riders.”
Soudal-QuickStep’s struggles here were illustrated plainly by that first ascent of the Kemmelberg, where none of men in blue made the group of dangermen that drifted off the front. After dispatching sprinter Fabio Jakobsen in a doomed lone attempt to bridge up to the move, Kasper Asgreen worked diligently to bring it back, but his efforts effectively precluded him from making any further impression on…
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