Drawing Dead
Quentin Pacher loses an unwinnable stage, and an update on the Ben O'Connor Countdown Clock
The guy over on the far right of this picture is Quentin Pacher. He’s 32 years old, and he rides for Groupama-FDJ. Pacher has had a solid professional career, having spent the past five seasons riding in the top two levels of the sport, and this Vuelta is his sixth career grand tour. But he’s never won a professional race.
Second from the right is Wout van Aert. You know him, either because you read this newsletter or because he’s one of the best and most famous riders on the planet, or because the race organizers have seen fit to loan him that distinctive green kit because he’s the leader of the points classification.
Van Aert came into Stage 10 of the Vuelta a España having already won two stages, to bring his career grand tour stage win total to 11. What makes van Aert special is his versatility. He’s a top-five time trialist on his day, a top-five cobbled classics rider, and a good enough climber that Visma-Lease a Bike uses him as a hybrid domestique, controlling the race on the flat and pegging the tempo on the lower pitches of big mountains to shake off the laggards. He might not be a top-five sprinter full stop, but in a race like this where the main competition is, like, Kaden Groves, he can hang.
Where van Aert might actually be the best in the world is in a breakaway, where he has the power to pull, the guts to climb, and the speed to dust anyone else who can do the first two things. This is where he spends his grand tours. If Visma-LAB has a GC rider in contention, often as not he’ll wait up and serve as a satellite rider. But that’s not the case here, so Wout gets to cook.
You don’t need to know the other three guys in that photo. They’re not important.1
I want to take you to the end of the stage. Pacher and van Aert have dispensed with their three erstwhile companions, and enter the final two kilometers of the race with a lead of roughly two minutes on their nearest pursuers and five and change on the peloton proper.
In theory, Pacher has tactical parity with van Aert. Nobody’s going to catch them, no matter how much they fuck around. They could stop off at a roadside restaurant for a cheeseburger and one of them would still win the stage. It would come down to either a heads-up sprint or a sudden medium-range attack—a Kristen Faulkner Special, if you will.
And I feel for Pacher, this perpetual participant, because with two kilometers left to race, he was the most fucked anyone’s ever been in a heads-up situation. Of all the unlikely wins from this position—the diesel Kasper Asgreen in a sprint against Mathieu van der Poel at Tour of Flanders, Ian Stannard going 1-on-3 against Quick Step—nobody’s ever been this fucked.
I respect cyclists, because they spend all day doing two things that give me the heebie-jeebies just to think about. First, constant, monotonous cardio. Second: While they’re burning 6,000 calories in four hours, they’re staring across the road at each other trying to figure out who’s going to betray them, when, and how. For someone who has lifelong trust issues, it’s a nightmare.
Wout van Aert didn’t need to worry. I’ve seldom seen a rider in his position so cool and collected. He came into that final two kilometers knowing that if the stage came down to a sprint, he’d torch Pacher. That put the impetus entirely on Pacher to make the first move, and because there was literally nothing else happening, no chase worth mentioning coming behind, van Aert could devote his entire undivided attention to Pacher.
What Pacher needed was a distraction, any reason for van Aert to take his eye off the ball. Without that, any attack was doomed to failure. The only thing Pacher had going for him was that van Aert, whether out of habit or altruism or whatever, was still pulling through to take turns at the front. That gave Pacher an opportunity to spin up his attack while he was in van Aert’s blind spot.2
With 1.7 kilometers left, about 2:10 in the video above, Pacher saw his moment. He spun up his attack, got out of his saddle, and put everything into his one big, low-percentage move.
And it failed. Quickly, entirely, and hilariously. Pacher took forever to crank up his tempo, get out of the saddle, and swing over across the road. If he ever got more than a bike length ahead, it was only for a fraction of a second. Van Aert almost lazily crossed over to get on Pacher’s tail, which he did in a moment, only barely getting out of the saddle to do so.
Pacher had gone all-in, and flipped over deuce-seven off-suit.
After that, there was no goodwill roll-through from van Aert. A father might go easy on his grade-school-aged child in a game of 1-on-1 in the driveway, until the kid tries (and fails) to punch Dad in the nuts. You have abused my largesse, van Aert said, and there will be no more of it.
So as they did the last of their 110-and-change kilometers on the road together, van Aert kept his front wheel glued to the bottom of Pacher’s saddle. There would not be a second attack, mostly because Pacher would’ve needed a motorcycle to create enough separation to make it stick, but also because van Aert was claiming prime position.
The sprint, if you want to call it that, was even more of a foregone conclusion than it looked a minute earlier. Pacher just gave up once van Aert came out of his slipstream. And I don’t blame him. This race had been over for ages, and continuing to pretend otherwise was becoming dishonorable.
Nobody’s ever been this fucked.