The Perfect First Bike Race
Visma-Lease a Bike's perfect weekend featured everything you'd ever want to see in a race.
Here’s the top finisher on Visma-Lease a Bike from every race the team contested last weekend, men’s and women’s:
Friday
UAE Tour, Stage 5: 1st, Olav Kooij
O Gran Camiño, Stage 2: 1st, Jonas Vingegaard
Saturday
Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Men: 1st, Jan Tratnik
Omloop Het Niewsblad, Women: 1st, Marianne Vos
O Gran Camiño, Stage 3: 1st, Jonas Vingegaard
UAE Tour, Stage 6: 16th, Olav Kooij
Sunday
Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne: 1st, Wout van Aert
O Gran Camiño, Stage 4: 1st, Jonas Vingegaard
O Gran Camiño GC: 1st, Jonas Vingegaard
UAE Tour, Stage 7: 5th, Attila Valter
UAE Tour GC: 5th, Attila Valter
Poor showing in the UAE Tour then. What a pity.
All this doesn’t include third and fifth place at Omloop for van Aert and Christophe Laporte, respectively, or Laporte’s fourth place at Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. So in both of the major men’s classics races this weekend, Visma-LAB won both the race and the bunch sprint in the second group on the road. Cian Uijtdebroeks also had top five stage and overall placings in support of Vingegaard at O Gran Camiño.
At women’s Omloop, Vos made the final escape group of four riders and played Lotte Kopecky like a fiddle in the sprint; rumors of Vos’s demise seem to have been exaggerated. At Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, van Aert attacked and broke off from the peloton with some 90 kilometers of flat road ahead, then stayed away with only two other riders in his group for most of the day.1
But I want to focus on the men’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. I’ve mentioned this before, but in January, the Baseball Bar-B-Cast did an episode where they showed a random Orioles-Mariners game to Belgian cycling media personality Benji Naesen, who had never seen a ballgame before in his life. The idea was to get impressions from a totally new set of eyes on a game that was good, but not so spectacular that it would set unrealistic expectations going forward.
At the end of the show, they reversed the question and wondered what the best cycling race to show a total newcomer would be. This would be a pretty good choice.
That’s because there’s a clear animator to this race: the loaded Visma-Lease a Bike team that put four different riders in position to win this race, and also brought the defending champion and a recent Strade Bianche winner.
Did Visma-Lease a Bike pitch a tactical no-hitter? Absolutely not. This race was won on pure firepower and numerical superiority. But they showed their work to an extent that a normally inscrutable sport could be understood by anyone. (The video above is a highlight clip but FloBikes put the entire thing—a little over two hours—on YouTube this morning if you want the full experience.)
The first pivotal point in the race came early, before TV coverage even kicked off, when the peloton was split up by crosswinds. Once the split happened, the entire Visma-LAB team, including van Aert, worked hard to keep the stragglers behind. About 55 kilometers from the finish, the first peloton hit the Wolvenberg, a 600 meter climb, with Matteo Jorgenson in the lead, followed by van Aert and Laporte.
And they drilled it. Jorgenson dragged the head of peloton so hard the body just snapped off, and by the time the leaders crested the climb, it was the Visma-LAB trio out in front with just four riders total with them: Toms Skujiņš of Lidl-Trek, Arnaud De Lie of Lotto-Dstny, Gianni Moscon of Soudal-Quick Step and Tom Pidcock of Ineos Grenadiers. Moscon was soon dropped, leaving Visma-LAB equal in number to the rest of the lead group put together.
Numerical superiority doesn’t equal victory, certainly not 50 kilometers out. It was at this very race in 2015 that Sky’s Ian Stannard entered the finale outnumbered three-to-one by Quick Step riders and came out on top.
But with three riders working together, Visma could spend more energy to keep the breakaway going, splitting the workload among van Aert, Jorgenson and Laporte. If another rider attacked the group—as Skujiņš did—a Visma-LAB rider would chase him down and sit on his wheel until the other four caught up. When Skujiņš went, van Aert closed him down, and the Latvian basically just gave up. He knew that even if he could drag van Aert to the finish line ahead of his pursuers, he’d have no shot at beating him to the line. And van Aert would have no incentive to work with him.
As the break wore on, it became increasingly clear that Pidcock didn’t have the legs to win. Skujiņš is no match for van Aert or Laporte in a one-up sprint. De Lie very much is, so he’d have to be dispensed with eventually, but there was still time for the boys in yellow to do it.
With about 20 kilometers to go, Jorgenson threw the first serious punch. It was such an aesthetically pretty attack—at about 2:10 in the video above; I took a screenshot but it doesn’t really do it justice. The American drifted to the back of the leading group and almost wound up like he was about to throw a bolo punch. He then veered off to the far left side of the road and zoomed off into the distance.
This was like an option pitch play for Visma-LAB. The other riders in the lead group had two options. First: Someone—probably De Lie, since Pidcock was so gassed—could run Jorgenson down. Doing so would require burning a match, however, and would weaken De Lie for the final sprint. More likely, Laporte or van Aert would immediately counterattack once Jorgenson had been caught, forcing an increasingly tired De Lie to chase again and drag the third, fresh Visma-LAB rider to the finale.
Option No. 2: Let Jorgenson go. The last big American win at a Belgian classics race was by a 19-year-old Magnus Sheffield at 2022 Brabantse Pijl in precisely these circumstances. He was one of three Ineos Grenadiers riders in a seven-man leading group, and he just sort of meandered off the front with 3.7 kilometers to go.
Ineos had been working Tim Wellens and Remco Evenepoel over just the same as Visma-LAB had been doing to De Lie, and Remco declined to give chase, because he knew that even if he caught Sheffield—not a sure thing given Sheffield’s time trial ability—all he’d be doing is dragging Pidcock and Ben Turner into position to beat him at the line.
So De Lie2 and the others called Visma-LAB’s bluff and let Jorgenson go with 20 kilometers and two climbs left on the map.
At this point I started freaking out. Americans tend to be time trialists and GC riders, not cobbled classics specialists, but Jorgenson had looked strong and beefy and assured, practically van Aert-like, all afternoon. And he was being allowed to solo to the biggest win of his career in the first race of classics season. And in this the year of American victories: Will Barta’s first career win, Brandon McNulty’s GC win in Valencia and time trial win at the UAE Tour3, Sheffield’s statement time trial. And 24 hours later, Kristen Faulkner would win Omloop van het Hageland by going solo for the final 50 kilometers.
One of the last good things the internet produced was Morbotron, an exhaustive archive of searchable Futurama screenshots. I keep one product of Morbotron at hand for use on Twitter whenever an American athlete does something good.
Indeed, when Jorgenson stretched the lead to 20 seconds, I was swelling with patriotic mucus.
But it raises the question: What was there to call about Visma-LAB’s bluff? What incentive would van Aert and Laporte have to work, when De Lie had all but guaranteed their teammate the win?
Because the peloton was still coming. And when the cohesion fell apart in the van Aert group, the peloton caught it within a few minutes. Jorgenson, who had just been 20 seconds ahead of a group of five disorganized riders who’d spent the previous 40 kilometers with their noses in the wind, was now just 20 seconds up on a group of about 30 well-rested and highly-determined pursuers.
Jorgenson’s solo adventure had lasted all of 10 kilometers, and all of Visma-LAB’s work had been for naught.
The Dutch team then had to pivot again. Plan A had been to bring all three riders to the line after wearing De Lie and Pidcock out. That hadn’t worked. Plan B had been Jorgenson. That hadn’t worked either. Plan C, most likely: Take their chances with van Aert in a bunch sprint. All afternoon, the other three Visma-LAB riders—Jan Tratnik, Tiesj Benoot and Dylan van Baarle—had been near, but not at, the front of the peloton. They made Visma-LAB the most numerous team in the front group still, but six riders out of the 30 or so who’d be in the group by race’s end was even less of a guarantee of victory than a three-of-six advantage.
Jorgenson got caught on the final cobbled climb, the Bosberg, which meant it took a moment for everyone to get recombombulated once they hit tarmac again, and some time after that for the rest of the peloton to catch up.
When the junction was made, there were 15 riders in the lead group, five of them—Tratnik, van Baarle, van Aert, Jorgenson, and Laporte—from Visma-LAB. Of the 10 others, Skujiņš and De Lie were tired from being in the break all day, while Iván García Cortina had just put in an enormous effort to lead the chase of Jorgenson.
Visma-LAB had two fresh riders, while only two other teams—Decathlon-AG2R and UAE Team Emirates—had two riders total in the group. So the time came for Plan D: Tratnik attacked with 8.7 kilometers to go, followed by UAE’s Nils Politt, a hulking 6-foot-4 German who finished second in Paris-Roubaix in 2019.
Tratnik is a bit of an odd duck; he’s basically the only Slovenian rider in the peloton who isn’t the best in the world at something or other.4 But he’s decent in a time trial and can get over smaller hills, and had taken his climbing to another level in the Volta ao Algarve the week before. Of the five Visma-LAB riders to hit the final flat section among the leaders, Tratnik was probably the least dangerous in a sprint, but that didn’t matter for two reasons.
First, Politt is big and powerful, but not particularly fast or explosive. Second, once Tratnik established the lead, he didn’t have to do any work. Here’s the final 5.8 kilometers of the race.
Tratnik takes his pulls at the front, but you can see how little work he’s doing when Politt is setting the pace. Tratnik, being a good five inches shorter, gets an incredible draft off Politt and barely pedaled.
When the pair hit the flamme rouge, marking the final kilometer of the race, Tratnik peeled off and got behind Politt. And he stayed there for the next 750 meters of the race, conserving his energy while his opponent burned every last calorie he had to keep the chase group behind them. The next time Tratnik put his face in the wind, it was to open up his sprint with 200 meters to go.
By the time Tratnik jumped out of Politt’s slipstream, the big German was bushed. Politt was able to pump out—I counted—all of five pedal strokes before he either missed a gear change or felt his quads give in to lactic acidosis. With a rueful shake of his head, Politt conceded, and Tratnik soloed easily to victory. Van Aert won the sprint for third, and pumped his first as he crossed the line.
I don’t know if van Aert’s effort in the earlier breakaway was futile. Certainly his team’s numerical superiority in the lead group had allowed Tratnik to goldbrick his way through the first 190 kilometers of the race and pop up like a freshly napped toddler for his attack.
Having three strong riders in a six-man break and getting caught 10 kilometers from the finish could’ve turned into a massive blunder. Visma-LAB’s tactics only worked because of the strength of their riders, and the depth they had with Tratnik and van Baarle in the peloton.
At the same time, if the leading trio had represented Visma-LAB’s only shot at victory, they probably would’ve played the six-man chase differently. Either the whole group would’ve gone over the Bosberg together—probably dropping Pidcock and/or Skujiņš along the way—or van Aert and Laporte wouldn’t have shut it down the whole way and allowed the peloton to make the catch.
Nevertheless, the best defense is a good offense, and the best tactical plan involves starting the race with the best riders, and bringing more of them to the finale than any other team. It was a great introduction to the classics season, and a great introduction to the sport for anyone watching for the first time.
Poor Oier Lazkano just barely held onto van Aert and Tim Wellens and made it to the finish. He looked more tired than any man has ever looked by the end of the race.
De Lie rode a monster race, in case it’s not clear already.
“Hey, whatever happened to McNulty on Jebel Hafeet?” I don’t want to talk about it.
When the Slovenian national team gets together, such as at the Tokyo Olympic road race, it’s frequently Tadej Pogačar, Matej Mohorič, Primož Roglič and Tratnik racing together. Which has a distinct air of—at the risk of going too heavily on the Futurama references—“Save my friends…and Zoidberg!”