The first complete week of the Tour de France has been a pincer movement, with the peloton trapped between two towering figures. On Friday the leader, Tadej Pogacar, produced a second successive stage win to put him in pole position for a hat-trick of overall titles. But the rider he deposed on Thursday, Wout van Aert, has been dominant at times and looks certain to be a defining figure as the race unfolds in the next two weeks.
It is rare for any rider not involved in the final overall battle to be as influential as Van Aert was last week. He began by finishing second on the first three stages in Denmark – a remarkable achievement in itself and one that put him in the yellow jersey – and then managed one of the most spectacular stage wins of recent years into Calais, a solo effort from 12km out with the entire race trailing in his wake. The image is an indelible one: Van Aert unleashed on the climb of Cap Blanc-Nez with his nominal leader, Jonas Vingegaard, clinging on desperately, then unable to hold his pace.
On Wednesday’s cobbled stage across northern France, Van Aert put in another display of strength but this time at the other end of the race after a crash 20km before the first section of pavé. He regained the peloton and spent the final kilometres chasing hard to keep Vingegaard in the race by limiting his eventual deficit on Pogacar to 13sec. He had some help from the Ineos team, but it was largely his strength that saved the day for Vingegaard and the Ineos leaders Adam Yates, Dani Martínez and Geraint Thomas.
To cap that, when the race left Longwy in Van Aert’s native Belgium the following morning in breezy conditions, he was on the attack immediately. For just over an hour he kept stretching the peloton until the cord snapped and Van Aert was away, in a three-rider escape that lasted until the hills close to the finish 140km later. It was a fruitless move, probably one that cost him his yellow jersey, but it was also an impressive coup de panache worthy of legends such as Bernard Hinault or Eddy Merckx – and it could have blown the race apart. He followed that up with victory in Lausanne in Saturday’s eighth stage.
Van Aert is arguably the rider of the season behind Pogacar, but in a different register, being a rider who hunts individual stages and one-day races. His seven wins this season include the Nieuwsblad and E3 one-day Classics, while last season he achieved an astonishing hat-trick of stage wins in the Tour: a mountain stage over Mont Ventoux, an individual time trial and the final sprint up the Champs Elysées.
In the UK, fans will recall his dominance in last year’s Tour of Britain. In Belgium, fans note that he comes from Herentals, the town of Rik Van Looy, the “Emperor” who ruled the roost in one-day racing in the 1960s.
Now 27, Van Aert has progressed rapidly since his World Tour debut in 2018 after years on top of the cyclo-cross scene. That year was largely memorable for a spectacular attack of cramp on the final climb in the Strade Bianche one-day Classic; it was after Van Aert’s big-money transfer to Jumbo-Visma later that year that his road career really took flight.
“He’s the best all-round rider ever,” was the verdict of the young American Quinn Simmons, who tried – and failed – to hold Van Aert in the three-rider escape on Thursday.
“He was never out of the front 15 for 80km, he was really impressive. It’s like we are all schoolboys alongside him,” said the Frenchman Guillaume Martin. Yorkshire’s Tom Pidcock just said: “He was playing with our balls.”
Quite what Van Aert was up to on Thursday was the focus of debate, but the consensus was that his non-stop attacking was an attempt to put pressure on Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates. Two of their riders, Marc Hirschi and George Bennett, were struggling off the back; with a tight time limit on the stage, if other teams such as Bora-Hansgrohe and Ineos had chipped in, Pogacar might have found himself two men down – and it could have been three, with his teammate Vegard Stake Laengen going home on Friday morning with Covid-19.
Van Aert’s aggression earned plaudits from one of French cycling’s sternest traditionalists, Marc Madiot, a team manager who earned his spurs alongside Hinault and Laurent Fignon. “Jumbo were pushing their pawns forward to harass [UAE], harass, harass,” he said.
“They’ve adopted a tactic which involves destabilising UAE to force them into working every day, so that later in the race they can get Pogacar on his own in the mountains. It’s a war of attrition.”
Madiot is a Van Aert fan. “I have profound admiration for him. He embodies cycling in its totality.”
It remains to be seen how Van Aert directs his considerable talents in the next couple of weeks. He is targeting the green jersey of points winner, but with his teammates Vingegaard and Primoz Roglic in the mix for the podium, he will have to combine that with team duties. Whether the green jersey turns out to be a consolation prize for the Jumbo-Visma team will depend on how much pressure can be exerted on Pogacar, who has looked flawless in the opening week.
