All Over But the Shouting
How am I supposed to live W(ith)out you?
This newsletter’s coming out a couple hours late, ostensibly to accommodate the highly eventful Stage 16 of the Vuelta, but mostly because last weekend was Labor Day in the U.S., and I have a strong philosophical objection to performing work on that most sacred of holidays.
Good thing I procrastinated—otherwise I would’ve published just before the most eventful stage of the Vuelta so far, one in which we came five seconds from seeing all four classification jerseys change hands.
The biggest news of the day was the crash and abandon of Wout van Aert on the descent before the final climb. It’s been an up-and-down season for van Aert, who had some strong results in the first week of classics season, but crashed at Dwars Door Vlaanderen. That knocked him out of his planned participation in in the cobbled monuments and the Giro d’Italia. And since then, he came home empty-handed from the Tour de France—both personally and in terms of helping Visma-Lease a Bike win the GC—and missed out on yet another Olympic gold medal.
One of the draws of the Vuelta is that nobody really targets it. It’s a race for survivors and desperate people; anyone who’s satisfied with how their season’s gone—a Tadej Pogačar, or Remco Evenepoel, or Mathieu van der Poel—doesn’t bother coming. The Vuelta is for riders who are at the end of their rope and still have something to prove. And for the first time, that’s van Aert.
And against this slightly weaker field, he’d been nothing short of dominant. He’d been winning sprints left and right, launching breakaway attacks at will. At the time of the crash, he’d won three individual stages and come second in three others—out of 15 total. He got into five different 100-kilometer breakaways between Stages 9 and 16, and held the lead in both the points classification and the king of the mountains classifications. If he’d taken both jerseys to the finish, he’d have been the first rider to do so at any grand tour since 2001.
Van Aert lives in this frustrating kind of Duke Snider existence, where he’s a Hall of Famer—or he would be if cycling had such a thing—but suffers from constant comparison to riders who completely changed the paradigm of the sport. Set him up against mere mortals and he looks like a kid playing down an age level. And after an injury-plagued season following years of frustrating near-misses, he was finally reasserting himself as one of the sport’s biggest stars.
On Tuesday morning, there was a moment where it looked like he was launching a 100-kilometer solo attack, rebuking his reluctant breakaway companions. So much of the legend of cycling relies of style points, and this would’ve been a career-defining move from a man best known for cobbles and sprints. Eventually, Group 2 got the hint and van Aert gave up, but few riders could even make such a threat credibly.
A couple hours later, he was following Jayco Alula rider Felix Engelhardt around a medium-speed downhill bend. It had been raining, so not only was the tarmac slick, all the oil and sand and crap that settles into the road surface floated back up to the top. Engelhardt took the corner too quickly and ended up bouncing off a curb and onto a gentle sloping hillside. Close behind him was van Aert, who caught the worst of the impact, and Our Man Isaac Del Toro.
And that was that. In an instant. The team car was on the scene in moments to give van Aert a new bike, but after about a minute of rolling, van Aert knew it was no good. It looked like he landed awkwardly on the curb and dinged up his leg; hopefully he’ll get away with some scrapes and bruises rather than something more serious. As of now, all the team is reporting is that he’s been taken to the hospital for scans.
Two weeks as an imperious, menacing, almost condescending figure towering over the peloton. Reduced to sitting on on the bumper of a Skoda station wagon, blood pouring from wounds on his arms and legs, staring at a spot on the ground, eyes completely unfocused from pain or shock or sadness.
Because you have to finish the race to win a secondary classification, this crash all but hands the green jersey to Kaden Groves. The polka-dot KOM jersey is a little closer, with Jay Vine leading his UAE teammate Marc Soler by 56 points to 42, but watching them decide who goes for the dots is a fraction as interesting as seeing if van Aert can do the double.