Visma | Lease a Bike see signs of progress against Van der Poel after Van Aert’s In Flanders Fields ride

As a team, Visma | Lease a Bike may not have looked quite as strong overall as Alpecin-Premier Tech, Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale and Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, partly because of circumstances, but the Dutch squad still ended up with two of the right cards in the finale through Van Aert and Christophe Laporte, who eventually finished third.

Matthew Brennan had been expected to play the Jasper Philipsen role for the yellow-and-black team. “For Matthew, it was a case of not yet being one hundred percent and then having to race 240 kilometres. That was too much. We had hoped he would have recovered in time, but that turned out not to be the case,” sports director Maarten Wynants explained.

Wynants felt his riders executed the plan well. “Our plan was to take control of the race on the second passage of the Kemmelberg, and our positioning was good as well. We rode the race the way we needed to ride it.”

Van Aert was the one who made the move on that Kemmelberg, bridging across with Mathieu van der Poel and Florian Vermeersch to the front group. On the final passage of the hill, Van der Poel kicked again, but Van Aert was able to follow.

In the press room, many journalists were already enjoying the idea of an old-school one-on-one duel between Van der Poel and Van Aert, but that was without taking into account Van der Poel’s tactical thinking and how he was feeling. The Dutchman chose to play the Jasper Philipsen card instead.

“That is of course disappointing,” Van Aert said afterwards. “All through the finale, it looks like you are riding for the win, and then that group still comes back on you in the final kilometre. I had hoped it would turn out differently.”

“At the start we were riding flat out, but after Ypres Mathieu stopped fully committing. He decided to race it tactically, and if you then see Jasper win, it worked out well for them. But for me it was annoying. I also had the disadvantage that I didn’t have Matthew behind me to play the same game.”

“With Brennan there, it would have been a completely different story, or at least a different dilemma,” Wynants said. “We are already very pleased that Wout was able to follow Van der Poel. In Tirreno, it still looked as though there was nothing anyone could do against him this spring, but now we are at least able to follow.”

Van Aert agreed with that assessment. “It felt good, but after that it was still a difficult finale. I was among the better riders in the race, and I’m satisfied with the way I was able to race. Wednesday and Sunday? They are coming up quickly, so now it is all about recovering well, staying healthy and hoping everything falls into place.”

“A wise man once said: we only take stock after Liège,” Wynants added, referring to former team boss Patrick Lefevere. “And in Wout’s case, we can now do that after Roubaix. It looks like we are moving in the right direction.”