I Wish They'd Stop Ruining Wout van Aert's Fun

How one of the world's most exciting riders is being undone by the machine that made him

"TDF30284 van aert" by babbo1957 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Three weeks ago, Wout van Aert dropped a bombshell: He’ll be riding the Giro d’Italia next year.

The 29-year-old Belgian superstar has raced the Tour de France five times, winning nine stages across four years, plus the points classification in 2022. But he’s never contested the Giro, and he’s never led his team at a grand tour. Grand tour leadership at Team Visma-Lease a Bike (I’ve typed that name in almost every post in the brief history of this newsletter and I detest it with all my soul) can be contentious, and he’s never gotten his shot.

Not every team enters a grand tour with realistic designs on winning; Team Visma-Lease a Bike does. Since Van Aert joined in 2019, Visma has won seven grand tours and podiumed 11, and it’s almost always had a GC contender in its squad, usually two. That’s usually Primož Roglič or Jonas Vingegaard, but they’ve also had Stefan Kruijswijk, Sepp Kuss, and (before his retirment) Tom Dumoulin.

Previous dominant GC teams—most notably U.S. Postal and the Sky/Ineos squads led by Chris Froome and others—went for the overall win to the exclusion of all other considerations. Not Visma. When the team leader is safe, other riders get let off the leash to pursue their own goals.

This is where van Aert has made his name. When riding for Roglič and Vingegaard, he’s one of the most valuable domestiques in the peloton. He can deliver a devastating brief uphill effort, reducing a peloton to a select group of favorites in a matter of a minute or two. This he’s done repeatedly at the Tour de France.

He’s especially valuable on the flat ground between climbs. If he makes it over a mountain with his team leader, van Aert can push the pace on downhill and level sections to maintain whatever gains were made on the way up.

But sometimes, van Aert ends up in a breakaway on a stage the GC group just isn’t interested in contesting. In 2021, he made international headlines by winning Stage 11 of the Tour de France, on a parcours that included a double traverse of Mont Ventoux. He followed that up by winning the final two stages of the race: an individual time trial and the sprint up the Champs-Elysees, the most prestigious sprint on the calendar.

This feat—winning a mountain stage, a time trial, and a mass sprint in the same Tour—was the definitive van Aert performance, because it showed him to be a uniquely versatile rider.

How did van Aert become this way?

Cyclocross.

The short version is that cyclocross is mountain biking on road racing equipment. Once kind of a niche discipline, something to pass the time in the winter offseason, cyclocross has exploded in popularity in the past decade because it’s so fan-friendly. Races take place over several laps of a short circuit that’s easily visible from the grandstands, and usually take an hour or less. This as opposed to a road race, which lasts all afternoon and can only be seen in person for a matter of seconds at a time.

And as cyclocross evolved into a professional discipline in its own right and the standard of competition evolved, riders realized that it was an outrageously effective cross-training sport for road racing.

Anyone who can compete at a high level in cyclocross has to be able to climb and pace oneself without the benefit of drafting for up to an hour (useful for time trialing). While road races take a rolling start, cyclocross riders start from a dead stop, and the first one to reach the first corner gets a massive advantage—the ability to put lots of power down quickly has benefits not just for sprinting, but for attacking anywhere in a road race.

Most of all, cyclocross riders are excellent bikehandlers, and after racing across a mix of mud, sand, gravel, and tarmac, cobblestones don’t bother them in the slightest.

Van Aert won three straight world cyclocross titles from age 21 to 23, then transitioned to road racing part-time in 2018 before joining what was then Jumbo-Visma full-time in 2019.

During the pandemic Jake Mintz, the baseball writer and podcaster and occasional cross-country cyclist, turned me on to the behind-the-scenes documentaries the Tour of Flanders produces every year. These films are awesome; eventually I’ll do a must-read and must-watch list, and Tour of Flanders docs will definitely be on it. The 2018 edition focused heavily on van Aert’s Tour of Flanders debut. Not only was he a local, having grown up outside of Antwerp, but the cobbled classics are a natural fit for a cyclocross champion.

Van Aert wasn’t the first to make the crossover. Zdeněk Štybar won three world titles in cyclocross and went on to win a stage of the Tour de France, Strade Bianche, and a handful of other big road races. To some extent, van Aert was the logical successor to Peter Sagan, the Slovakian rider who was one of the biggest stars of the 2010s. Partially because in a sport full of uptight introverts who fret over every tiny detail, Sagan was one of the most Dudes Rock athletes of all time in any sport.

Sagan was a mountain biker by training, not a cyclocrosser. But like van Aert, he was best described as a classics specialist who could also hang with the world’s best sprinters, and without the benefit of a leadout train. Sagan also climbed and time trialed well for a rider of his profile, which allowed him to take a couple surprising stage race GC wins (including the Tour of California in 2015), and dominate the green jersey competition at the Tour de France.

But while Sagan was a good climber and time trialist for a sprinter, van Aert is one of the best time trialists in the world, full stop. And he can climb Mont Ventoux twice in a day and win.

Van Aert’s transition to road racing should’ve been cycling’s Shohei Ohtani moment—the athlete who showed an increasingly fragmented sport that it’s possible for one man to do it all—and there’s a not-too-distant timeline from our own in which van Aert attempts to ride for GC at the 2024 Giro.

The heavily crowded Visma leadership pool has thinned. Dumoulin is long retired. Roglič, sensing that this town was not big enough for both him and Vingegaard, left the team this offseason. Kuss and Kruijswijk are sitting the Giro out, while Vingegaard himself is laser-focused on winning his third straight Tour de France. No man has won the Giro and the Tour in the same year since 1998; Vingegaard won’t imperil his primary with a greedy long shot at making history.

But with the full backing of a strong team, van Aert might have been tempted. This Giro parcours is as van Aert-friendly as any grand tour he’s likely to see. It’s the shortest Giro since 1979, with 15 percent less climbing than the previous two editions. There’s no Monte Zoncolan, and relatively little action above 2,000 meters’ elevation, and even the brutal double ascent of Monte Grappa on stage 20 ends not on the summit, but after a descent, which would give van Aert a chance to gain back any time he loses going up the hill. There’s even a flat stage over the course of Strade Bianche, the mixed-gravel race van Aert won in 2020.

If van Aert were the only rider who could still do it all, he’d probably try it. Unfortunately, he was only a signifier of what was to come, not the entire future.

Cyclocross makes you good at everything, and of the recent crossover stars, van Aert is the most well-rounded. But when the races have actually played out, the practical effect of van Aert’s skill set has been him constantly finishing second.

Van Aert took his first Monument win in 2020, outsprinting Julian Alaphilippe to win Milan-San Remo. Since then, he’s finished in the top 10 of every Monument he’s entered (10 in all) and finished on the podium six times. But he hasn’t won since. In 2020 alone he won silver medals in both the world championship road race and individual time trial, plus another silver medal in the Olympic road race. He finished second in the time trial again in 2021, and took home another world road race silver, as well as a silver and a bronze medal at the European road cycling championships in 2023.

He’s been competitive in all kinds of races, as evidenced by the diversity of riders who have beaten him to the top step of the podium: Alaphilippe is a puncheur; Olympic road race champion Richard Carapaz a pure climber; two-time defending Liège–Bastogne–Liège champion Remco Evenepoel is a time trialist who’s becoming one of the world’s best stage racers.

And then there’s Mathieu van der Poel. Van der Poel is three months younger than van Aert, and won the cyclocross world championship the year before van Aert’s three-season streak, as well as four of the past five after van Aert started focusing primarily on road racing.

The rivalry between van Aert and van der Poel is a definitive one in both disciplines. Styles make fights. Both are excellent sprinters and bike handlers, but while van Aert is smooth and calculating, van der Poel is all action. Despite being much smaller than van Aert (6-foot, 165 pounds, as opposed to van Aert’s 6-foot-3, 172) and an inferior climber, van der Poel has a knack for making big moves stick.

Since van Aert’s first monument win, van der Poel has won four, including (much to van Aert’s chagrin) two Tours of Flanders. He also won a road race world championship this past summer; van der Poel cranked out enough of a lead that he was able to crash on the final lap and still beat the field, led by van Aert, by a minute and 37 seconds.

On almost any terrain short of extreme mountains, van Aert will be among the favorites, but he’s rarely if ever the favorite.

So now van Aert is almost 30, and while he’s piled up enough wins for two lifetimes, he still wants more. One of the main obstacles to van Aert is Tadej Pogačar, one of the best stage racers in the world. In 2021, his age-22 season, Pogačar won his second Tour de France, as well as two Monuments. So in 2022, he started dabbling in cobbled races, finishing fourth in the Tour of Flanders on his debut and winning it outright in 2023—a feat unheard of for a GC specialist in almost 40 years.

Van Aert can’t really screw around like that. Pogačar can ride the classics season in April and still recover in time for the Tour de France in June. Van Aert’s bread and butter is that March and April classics season, which ends just when he’d need to start peaking for the Giro.

This is what van Aert said on the Dutch cycling podcast De Rode Lantaarn:

“I don't always see limits, but I also look at things realistically. Riding for GC cannot be combined with the other things I want. Maybe I can ride a nice result if I sacrifice a lot for it, but I don't want that. I would hate to say I was fifth in the Giro, but the rest of the year I was bored, because I went altitude training 100 times and I had to lose an extra two kilograms. Even if I had general classification ambitions, it wouldn’t be to win, because my body shape is against me. If it’s not with the aim of winning, then I don’t think the sacrifice is worth it.”

The one thing van Aert can’t overcome is size. The weight at which he’s the strongest is just not tenable in this day and age for a grand tour GC contender. At least it hasn’t been since Miguel Induráin won five straight Tours in the 1990s, an era in which there was nothing suspicious at all happening in the sport that might allow riders to cross physiological boundaries. Nothing whatsoever, I’m offended that you’d even ask.

In order to even think about contending for GC at the Giro, van Aert would have to alter his body in ways that would weaken him against the likes of van der Poel in the cobbled monuments—the races he values most and has the best chance to win. To say nothing of the fact that cutting weight to try to win a grand tour can have dangerous physical and mental health consequences.

If there’s a cyclocrosser who’s got a shot at winning a grand tour in the near future, it’s probably Tom Pidcock, a 24-year-old Yorkshireman who races for Ineos Grenadiers. Pidcock is the only rider to interrupt van Aert and van der Poel’s combined dominance of the men’s elite cyclocross world championship; he also won the Olympic mountain bike championship in Tokyo, as well as the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France in 2022. Pidcock has also won the junior editions of both the Giro d’Italia and Paris-Roubaix.

Crucially, he races at under 130 pounds, which means he’s light enough to get over the highest mountains. He’s a virtual nonfactor in the time trial, but it’d be easier for him to overcome that weakness than it would be for van Aert to drop 20 pounds and climb with the tiny GC riders.

Pidcock’s emergence illustrates the frustrating paradox van Aert finds himself in; he kicked open the door from cyclocross, and the people who followed him through just will not leave him alone.

Van Aert’s 2024 program will give him ample opportunity to beat his rivals. In addition to the classics season and the Giro—where he’ll hunt stage wins and perhaps the points classification—van Aert is targeting the Olympic road race in Paris. Winning gold there would be a huge win, though once again, he’d have to fend off van der Poel, Pidcock, and a host of other contenders. Maybe he’ll finish second again.

This growing reputation as a serial silver medalist has an ironic precedent in cycling lore.

Van der Poel is the son of Adri van der Poel, a professional cyclist who (like his son) won a world cyclocross championship, multiple monuments, and two grand tour stages. But van der Poel’s maternal grandfather was the French cyclist Raymond Poulidor, who became a cult hero in France by racing the Tour de France 14 times, finishing in the top 10 11 times, and finishing on the podium eight times. But he never won, or even wore, the yellow jersey. Poulidor was an all-time great who just happened to be in his prime at the same time as Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx, the first two riders to win the Tour five times.

I think there’s something about cycling that makes the perpetual bridesmaid into a figure of romance, rather than pity. There’s so much suffering, so much failure in this sport that if you write off the hard-fought runner-up position—the way Ringz culture demands of us—there’d be no point to any of it.

As a fan of van Aert’s game, is that what I want? Knowing what he’s capable of as he smiles politely on the podium after losing to van der Poel or Evenepoel or Pidcock? Of course not. I want him to win the goddamn Tour of Flanders. I want him to win the Olympic gold medal and the rainbow jersey.

More specifically, I want him to have done all those things already, so he’d be free to try to shoot the moon and win the general classification at the Giro. Now, we’ll never know his limits.