Jumbo-Visma's Flandrian sweep
by Lionel Birnie
A few weeks ago in Tuscany, Demi Vollering and Lotte Kopecky – SD Worx teammates – arrived in the Piazza del Campo together at the finish of Strade Bianche and sprinted against each other as if they were sworn rivals, with every last drop of energy and desire they could summon. Vollering won, but it was close.
They were praised and criticised for their actions. Praised for honouring the race by fighting out the finish and criticised for not being ‘professional’, for hinting at division or indecision in the SD Worx ranks.
On Sunday, in freezing, wet conditions, Jumbo-Visma teammates Wout van Aert and Christophe Laporte staged their own Flandrian edition of the old Baracchi Trophy two-up time trial, breaking clear on the Kemmelberg and riding away to the finish together unopposed.
With plenty of time in hand and the victory assured, there was a debate about what they would do at the finish. Would they sprint against each other as Vollering and Kopecky had done? It seemed unlikely. Would Van Aert pull rank and take the win for himself – he is Belgian, after all? Or would he ‘gift’ it to Laporte, partly as a thank you for last year at the E3 Saxo Classic and partly to ensure total loyalty for the bigger races to come?
Just as they did at the E3 Saxo Classic last year, the pair sat up and rolled towards the line, arms aloft, recreating the famous finish between Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond at Alpe d’Huez in the 1986 Tour. Last year in Harelbeke, Van Aert, then the reigning Belgian champion, won just ahead of Laporte.
This time, Laporte was allowed to cross the line first – only the fourth French winner of Gent-Wevelgem – and the issue of whether race victories should be gifted or not flared up again.
Funnily enough, both answers are right – or at least neither is wrong. Shrödinger’s Team Tactics, if you will. The Vollering-Kopecky finish did honour the race in a way that Van Aert and Laporte did not and yet, as a spectator, watching a race come to an arranged conclusion does deliver a large dose of anti-climax. I understand why Jumbo-Visma did what they did, though. As our friend François Thomazeau always says in these situations, cycling is a team sport practiced by individuals.
It did look coldly professional dividing up the spoils clinically in the manner they did. And yet it reinforced the idea that Flanders is currently Jumbo-Visma’s back yard and everyone else is just visiting.
As if to prove the point that no gifts were required, Laporte soloed to another victory at Dwars Door Vlaanderen on Wednesday, giving the Dutch team a near perfect record in the cobbled races they’ve done this spring. Only Jasper Philipsen stands between them and a clean sweep stretching from Omloop Het Nieuwsblad to Dwars Door Vlaanderen. However, they will be aware that it’s the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix that really count and that if they come up short on the the next two Sundays there will be a slight sense of disappointment about the spring campaign, preposterous as that sounds.
The same goes for SD Worx, who have a similar embarrassment of riches and will go into the next two Sundays as the team to beat. The question for everyone else is how to stop them and if one thing has become clear it’s that hesitating to see how things turn out when Jumbo-Visma or SD Worx riders make a move has not gone well for their opponents so far.
It’s not impossible to think that Van Aert, Laporte and, say, Dylan van Baarle could do a ‘Mapei’ a week on Sunday. Back in 1996, the Mapei-GB team had the ultimate dilemma as three of their riders approached the velodrome in Roubaix well clear of the rest. First, second and third places were sewn up and it was up to the team management, Patrick Lefevere, and, as legend has it, Dr Giorgio Squinzi, the boss of the Mapei company, to decide the finishing order. Lefevere talked about this incident in an episode for Friends of the Podcast a few years ago. Despite Andrea Tafi’s protests, the Roman Emperor decreed that Johan Museeuw should finish first, Gianluca Bortolami second and Tafi third. It’s unlikely Lefevere will be in such a position this Sunday, given Soudal-Quick Step’s current slump.
But before Roubaix, there’s the Tour of Flanders, which Van Aert is yet to win. Last year he missed the race with Covid. His best result is second in 2020, when he was edged out by Mathieu van der Poel. It’s a gap on his palmares that will become a chasm if he doesn’t win it in the next year or two. Anything could happen, of course, but it is hard to look beyond Jumbo-Visma, or one of the three amigos, or three bears, or Ross, Chandler and Joey – or however you prefer to think of Van Aert, Van der Poel and Pogačar.
Jumbo-Visma in the men’s Flandrian cobbled classics
Omloop Het Nieuwsblad – 1st Dylan van Baarle, 3rd Christophe Laporte
Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne – 1st Tiesj Benoot, 2nd Nathan van Hooydonck
Classic Brugge-De Panne – 2nd Olav Kooij
E3 Saxo Classic – 1st Wout van Aert
Gent-Wevelgem – 1st Christophe Laporte, 2nd Wout van Aert
Dwars Door Vlaanderen – 1st Christophe Laporte
SD Worx in the women’s Flandrian cobbled classics
Omloop Het Nieuwsblad – 1st Lotte Kopecky, 2nd Lorena Wiebes
Nokere Koerse – 1st Lotte Kopecky, 2nd Lorena Wiebes
Classic Brugge-De Panne – 3rd Lorena Wiebes
Gent-Wevelgem – 1st Marlen Reusser
Dwars Door Vlaanderen – 1st Demi Vollering
Arrivée returns on Sunday
There will be two episodes of Arrivée covering the Tour of Flanders on Sunday. I will dial up Daniel from Oudenaarde to dissect the men’s race, and Rose Manley and Lizzy Banks will tackle the women’s race.
Vote for us in the Sports Podcast Awards
The Tour d’Écosse has been shortlisted for the Sports Podcast Awards and the voting window closes on April 6. We are in the Wilderness category so if you enjoyed the series please register and vote for us.
GCN+ discount for UK listeners
Our friends at GCN+ have been sponsoring episodes leading up to each of the big Classics, which they will broadcast live and uninterrupted, and they are offering a 15% discount on an annual subscription at gcn.eu/cycling15
From the vault: Lunch with Colin Sturgess
Listener Tony Orme emailed this week to say he’d signed up as a Friend of the Podcast but was disappointed not to see our Lunch With Colin Sturgess episodes on the feed.
Back in June 2018, I travelled to Leicester to meet Colin to talk about his career and life after retiring as a rider. It was an absorbing conversation with lots of highs and lows. From winning the world professional pursuit title on the track in 1989 to suffering from severe depression after retirement, Colin was remarkably open and engaging.
Those episodes pre-dated our ‘new’ Friends of the Podcast system and although we have added several popular episodes from the archives, Lunch with Colin Sturgess was not among them, until now.
So, for you Tony – and anyone else who’d like to listen – we’ve added the two episodes to the Friends of the Podcast feed.
If there are any episodes from our archive you’d like to hear again, get in touch at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com
It’s been a difficult week for us here at The Cycling Podcast, as we marked the anniversary of Richard’s passing. As I said in the podcast, it has felt like the longest year imaginable and yet it feels like only yesterday that we heard the awful news.
Every race is a reminder of our loss, and it was especially felt on Sunday as we watched Gent-Wevelgem, which was the last race Richard covered. I remember his excitement at witnessing Biniam Girmay’s win and how much he was looking forward to recording the podcast the following morning.
I’d love to be able to ask Richard what he thought of Van der Poel’s descent of the Poggio and what he made of Vollering versus Kopecky at Strade Bianche. His enthusiasm for the races and the stories was such that he’d be loving the prospect of Van Aert, Van der Poel and Pogačar going tyre to tyre in Flanders on Sunday.
In June we will mark another anniversary. It’ll be ten years since Richard, Daniel and I sat down on the grass in a London park on a warm June afternoon to record the first episode of The Cycling Podcast, or The Humans Event Cycling Podcast as it was called when we started. Richard pressed the record button on his iPhone (we had no fancy recording equipment then) and away we went.
There have been testing times over the past year, both personally and professionally, but the thing that brought the three of us together in the first place has spurred us on at the most difficult moments.
Until this week, I’d not had the opportunity to publicly thank Daniel for steering the ship through the second half of last year, while I stepped back from the mic to work on things behind the scenes as we adjusted to life without Richard.
Daniel and I would also like to thank everyone who works with us on The Cycling Podcast – our brilliant producers and the growing team of hosts and guests who have maintained the spirit of the Buffalo while putting their own stamp on our episodes. Also, David Luxton and everyone at DLA, the team at Audioboom and everyone at our sponsors Supersapiens, Science In Sport and MAAP for their support.
And most of all we’d like to say thank you to you, our listeners. We’ve received hundreds of emails and messages of support over the past year and although we can’t reply to them all we have read and appreciated every single one.
A few days after Richard died, Simon and I set off for Scotland. It was exactly what I needed – the opportunity to ride with a dear friend in Richard’s home country, embracing the peace that cycling in the quiet countryside can bring in order to help process the rawest grief. While we were on the road, a Friend of the Podcast, Patty O’Sullivan, posted a Robert Burns poem on our Facebook page that could have been written for Richard. Orla asked Chris Hoy to read the poem and we closed one of our Tour d’Écosse episodes with it. To mark this week’s anniversary, we played it at the end of this week’s episode too. I hope you agree it’s the perfect tribute to our friend.
Chris Hoy reads Epitaph On My Own Friend by Robert Burns
An honest man here lies at rest,
As e’er God with His image blest:
The friend of man, the friend of truth;
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d:
If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.
Robert Burns
The Burns poem is true, I remember hearing Chris Hoy reading it the first time and I shed a tear.
When you lose someone, be it friend or relative, your world changes forever and it takes time to adapt. In time it becomes easier to remember the happy times and what you learnt from those who have gone and so they remain to inspire and guide you.
It's been a long year - the way the whole team has pulled together to ensure Richards legacy continues when it might have been easier and less painful to stop. Thank you all and hopefully you do find genuine comfort in the knowledge the cycling podcast world are behind you every step of the way.