Wout van Aert was on an incredibly strong day at the Tour de France today but couldn’t make it work in the end. The Team Visma | Lease a Bike rider participated in many attacks during the day, assisted Jonas Vingegaard in his raid against Tadej Pogacar, and then still went on to be in the day’s breakaway and in the battle for the stage win.
But the feelings after the finish were not the best for the Belgian. “Yes, I’m very disappointed because I had the legs to win,” van Aert admitted to VTM. “Because I’m here to win stages, to achieve results. Improving is only fun in training.”
Van Aert early on spent a lot of energy working towards the team’s objective, but after the peloton stopped in the final 60 kilometers, van Aert was part of a group of five alongside Mathieu van der Poel. But this group was in hot pursuit of a different quintet, from which first and second on the day – Jonas Abrahamsen and Mauro Schmid – came from.
Van Aert still showed no signs of weakness in the final kilometers and put on a very strong ride to do the final climbs at a very high level. On the last one however he couldn’t keep up with Mathieu van der Poel, but the victory had already escaped both of them prior.
“I had already wasted a lot of energy by getting caught in the breakaway. I lacked that in the final. Mathieu and I were always watching each other closely,” he explains.
“I suspected he was going to try something on the final climb. And that proved to be the case: he put everything he had into that last climb. But in the end, he too came up short. In retrospect, we should have tried to close the gap earlier”.
In the final kilometers having a committed chase in a group that wasn’t understanding itself fully was not an option. “It’s always a matter of two minds with him in the group. You want to make it across, but also have something left for the final”.
