"You'd better start watching from kilometer 0!" Van der Poel and Rickaert already shared their bizarre effort with team and friends

“You'd better start watching from kilometer 0 tomorrow. Jonas and me. Duo attack behind the car,” Van der Poel wrote on Instagram DM to his regular training buddy Freddy Ovett on Saturday evening. The Brit must have laughed his head off but asked his buddy, “What the f*ck, why?” Van der Poel already let him know that the beautiful duo attack was not a last-minute idea. “We want to try to ride the entire stage together. It's his dream to get on the podium of the Tour for the combativity award.”

The brave plans were also shared in the Alpecin-Deceuninck group chat before the starting shot had even been fired. After Van der Poel shared a photo, apparently from the rollers warming up, and Rickaert followed with a telling meme with a wink, Jasper Philipsen, who had already dropped out of the Tour de France, asked, “What's going to happen?” Van der Poel kept it short and sweet in the app: “Duo attack.”

“I joked about the two of us leaving from the start, but it seemed like he was serious,” Rickaert said afterward. But Van der Poel was dead serious, and so the two made an incredible effort. The Dutchman spoke of “a very tough day” at the limit. “The roads didn't help with two men in front, and with the wind, we knew that at some points, the classification riders would pick up the pace. It's a shame not to finish it off, but we put on a good show.”

Rickaert confirmed that he got a thumbs up from almost the entire peloton when he was caught, and Tadej Pogacar called Van der Poel, the last man standing, “crazy.” “Legendary,” Philipsen wrote on Rickaert's Instagram post. “Legend,” Ovett added. “What a day, what a ride. Thank you, Mathieu, for being part of this. Thank you, Alpecin-Deceuninck, for the opportunity. This means so much to me. It's a shame we just missed out on the victory. We can be proud of what we've done.”

Read more below the photo.

How special was it that van der Poel was only caught by a sprinting peloton in the final kilometer? Rickaert's Strava file told the whole story on Sunday evening. He completed 181.13 kilometers at an average speed of 47.7 kilometers per hour. Rickaert recorded an average weighted power output of 389 watts, and the duo set six KOMs (King of the Mountain) on various segments.

Let's examine Rickaert's actual effort, i.e., excluding the neutral phase before and the last 6 kilometers, during which he allowed Van der Poel to take the lead. The metrics are even more impressive: 49.8 kilometers per hour on average, 385 watts on average (via Instagram, he shared a normalized average power output of 398 watts), an average heart rate of 162, and that at temperatures of up to 33 degrees Celsius. Almost 5,000 calories were burned.