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“It had to be here, this is where my road career started in 2018,” said Wout Van Aert after taking his redemptive victory on stage nine of the Giro d’Italia after a trialing, tumultuous, and seemingly never-ending spell of near-misses and devastating frustrations for the Belgian superstar. He was speaking of his debut at Strade Bianche, which signalled the beginning of one of the most successful but at times most heartbreaking careers in the history of the sport.
Such is the nature of the cycling world that in the intervening period from career victory number 49 to 50, social media was littered with posts and comments writing obituaries of Van Aert’s career. That intervening period? Eight months and 21 days. It was only eight months. And what was that last win? A stage at the Vuelta a España no less. In that Grand Tour he won three stages and was well on his way to claiming the points competition, fighting for more stages and even a tilt at the mountains jersey, until a crash ended his race, severely injured his knee and set him on that fruitless journey documented so publicly. But, bike racing isn’t done behind phone screens. It is not decided by online chatter but ‘by the road’ as the saying goes. Indeed the cycling world is fickle at times, harsh at others and more often than not it’s brutal. Like in every sport, fans build riders up only to burn them down. Van Aert has experienced this and has spoken openly about the pressure he is under to perform and win races.
Van Aert abandoning the 2024 Vuelta a España (Image: Tim de Waele / Getty)
His rollercoaster didn’t even start on that wet descent in the Asturias mountains of the Vuelta but on the Flandrian roads of Dwars door Vlaanderen in March 2024, where another crash wreaked havoc on his Classics campaign and his season as a whole – it meant he couldn’t contest stage victories at the 2024 Giro either. It’s been quite the ride over the last 14 months for Van Aert so it was understandable to see him emotional at the finish of stage nine, taking his first win at a delayed debut at La Corsa Rosa.
At 30-years-old, Van Aert of all people knows that he is no longer the budding star that he was at Strade Bianche in 2018. He was up against one today — to get the better of Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) on the finish line at Siena’s Piazza del Campo, he had to use all of his experience. In the past we have seen Van Aert blast away through raw power and ability, at times at odds with what we had previously thought possible for a man of his size — like when he won the Ventoux stage of the 2021 Tour de France. Despite being a former Strade Bianche winner, today’s performance over the steep Tuscan pinches was just as memorable as that stage.
At points he was straining under the pressure young superstar Del Toro was exerting on the gravel climbs but when others like Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) and Mathias Vacek (Lidl-Trek) began to buckle and drop, Van Aert stuck to the Mexican rider’s wheel. In the end, he had to use all this knowledge of road riding and beyond to take the stage – the final couple of hundred metres were exemplary of his time as a cyclocrosser as Van Aert forced himself in front of Del Toro to take the best line and ultimately cross the finish first.
Van Aert crossing the line in Siena (Image: RCS)
The Belgian rider also used his guile today, knowing his team’s GC leader Simon Yates was safely in the second group — thanks to Van Aert’s own work positioning him on the first gravel section. This meant he didn’t have to ride with Del Toro because in doing so he would have helped the Mexican eke out more of a gap on his teammate. It might be true that Del Toro was the strongest rider today and Van Aert would be happy to admit that but it doesn’t really matter. All too often in the Visma-Lease a Bike rider’s career, has he been the strongest on the day only for crashes, mechanicals or bad positioning resulted in him missing out.
Van Aert has now won stages in consecutive Grand Tours, in doing so completing his Vuelta-Giro-Tour set, with a total of 13. Today might be the first Grand Tour stage win that he has taken in which he was not the strongest on the day, but nonetheless it was one of the most sentimental of them all. There is a chance he may never add to his one Monument victory, he may never become world champion on the road or in the time trial, but Van Aert can still win big. Even the most morose of fans would struggle to be bitter after today’s result. When Van Aert won, cycling won. It’s difficult to feel any other way.
