Godzilla vs. Mothra

And other stories from the week on two wheels

Photo Credit: Pauline Ballet, ASO

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert were ducking each other. In the self-declared time-to-scheiße-or-get-off-the-crapper season, van Aert has raced Omloop Het Niewusblad, Volta ao Algarve, and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, winning the latter. Van der Poel has taken to the road once, at Milan-San Remo, where he helped teammate Jasper Philipsen to victory and finished 10th himself.

The generation-defining rivals have faced off in cyclocross, where van der Poel won 13 of 14 starts; van Aert is the only rider to beat him this winter. But they haven’t started the same road race in almost eight months. Here’s what happened in their last five head-to-head matchups in one-day races, dating back 53 weeks:

• Milan-San Remo: van der Poel 1st, van Aert 3rd

• E3 Saxo Classic: van Aert 1st, van der Poel 2nd

• Tour of Flanders: van der Poel 2nd, van Aert 4th

• Paris-Roubaix: van der Poel 1st, van Aert 3rd

• World Road Race Championship: van der Poel 1st, van Aert 3rd

We’re now entering the thick end of the cobbled classics season, culminating in the Tour of Flanders on March 31, and Paris-Roubaix on April 7, and the discipline’s two biggest stars can only circle each other for so long without colliding.

Here is where, if I had any video editing skills whatsoever, I’d mash together one of those anime-style fight videos. Because the big boys are both going to the E3 Saxo Classic.¹

For two riders who are hell-bent on winning the Tour of Flanders, it strikes me that a race that covers a lot of the same terrain, nine days before the race, would make for ideal preparation. Clearly van Aert and van der Poel agree, which is why both are coming here. You’d think that a place like Flanders, which makes up half the land area of a country with a king and former overseas colonies, is pretty big. In reality, Flanders is a little more than half the land area of Maricopa County, Arizona.

So a 200-odd kilometer bike race is necessarily going to overlap with other 200-odd kilometer bike races held in the same region. The climbs to look out for are the Paterberg and the Oude Kwaremont, which come about three quarters of the way through E3 and near the end of Ronde van Vlaanderen.

I say “look out for,” but there’s a decent chance that by the time you’re reading this, the race will already be over. See, I picked 9 a.m. Friday—this newsletter’s normal publication time—in part because it’s a dead spot on the sports calendar. At least, that’s normally the case. But by 9 a.m. Friday, E3 will be barreling toward its (hopefully) exciting conclusion, which I realized only when I sat down to write this newsletter on Thursday afternoon. So rather than preview a race that’ll be in progress at the normal publication date, I’ll just send this on Thursday night. If you get to it beforehand, great. If not, well, try to catch the highlights.