Few people could’ve built a more star-filled podium at the UCI Road World Championships than the Mathieu van der Poel–Wout van Aert–Tadej Pogačar that came to pass at the end of the 271km race in Glasgow on Sunday.
The biggest names in the road cycling world came together on the challenging hilly city circuit to round out the six-hour race, with Dutchman Van der Poel chalking up another score in the eternal battle between him and long-time rival Van Aert.
The Belgian was second best on the rain-soaked day, soloing home at 1:37 down on Van der Poel, though said later on that he was neither “super happy” nor “really disappointed” with his result.
Van Aert, who now has three silver medals at the road Worlds across the time trial and road race to go with his three rainbow jerseys in cyclocross, said that he and his Belgian squad hadn’t made any major mistakes during the race.
“I think I’m not super happy or something because my goal was to come here and win the race,” Van Aert said in the post-race press conference. “On the other hand, I’m not really disappointed because I felt that I did a good race. I didn’t make mistakes and I had a super strong team around me to support me.
“I was in the final split and I thought that Mathieu was the strongest of the group. I really wanted to be on his wheel when he attacked, which I did, but it was still not enough. He dropped everyone including myself. You have to accept it and try to make the best of it behind him so in that case I was happy to still take a second place.”
Van Aert, who said that the race was “even harder than I expected”, said that he and his team could have realistically done little differently on the day, even if they didn’t come away with the coveted rainbow jersey.
In the end, despite not managing to match Van der Poel when his rival made the winning move on a hill at 22km to go, he still left behind Pogačar and Mads Pedersen 7km from the line to grab a well-deserved second place.
“I think I was always really well positioned,” he said later. “I wanted to be in the moves early on because I knew coming back is really hard on this course.
“I have the feeling I did that really well and my teammates supported me super good in the positioning and covering other than moves. So, I was there when I needed to be, but Mathieu was stronger when he attacked.”
Of course, after a day which saw Belgium with four men in the select lead group of favourites heading into the final 50km, Van Aert had little to…
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