The New Man
When I started this newsletter in late 2023, the first thing I had to do was put down a base coat of takes. Any new media vanity project(1) relies on the audience knowing the author. What’s the voice? What’s the tone? How does he approach the subject matter?
You’ve got to set expectations. Yes, because readers will only subscribe to something if they know what to expect from it, but because writing(2) is about expectations. Conventions govern narrative; or better yet, there can be no comedy or catharsis without first establishing a convention to subvert.
The base coat, as it was, turned out to be a list of my five favorite riders. Two (Chloe Dygert and Richard Carapaz) who rode in an especially compelling style, and two others (Kasia Niewiadoma and Neilson Powless) whose ambitions were repeatedly frustrated by epic near-misses.(3)
Then there was Wout van Aert, the dynamic do-everything superstar who nevertheless could not stop finishing second.
In December 2023, van Aert was at the peak of his powers. His transition from cyclocross to road racing had been bumpy — there was the Tour de France time trial crash in 2019 that almost ended his career, and then the pandemic — but he started off the resumed 2020 season with a bang: a win at Strade Bianche, and then a week later, Milan-San Remo. Van Aert was about to turn 26 when he won his first monument — and we absolutely thought of it as his first monument — and more and better was surely to come.
In the three years that followed, van Aert won Gent-Wevelgem, Amstel Gold, E3 and Omloop Het Niewsblad. He won six Tour de France stages and a green jersey, and helped Jonas Vingegaard to back-to-back GC titles in 2022 and 2023.
At that point, I would’ve said that van Aert was among the greatest all-around riders in the world, but I would’ve had to explain why. I would’ve had to explain how it’s almost impossible to win the points classification at a grand tour while in a team with a rider who’s also going for GC — you just can’t split up the division of labor like that — let alone win the green jersey at the Tour while actively serving as one of your GC leader’s key domestiques.
I would’ve had to explain why the diversity of his three stage wins at the 2021 Tour — a time trial, a mountain stage and the Champs-Élysées sprint — was so special. Likewise the dueling world championship silver medals in 2020: road race on a hilly course finishing on the Imola autodrome, and a time trial behind Filippo Ganna. I was fascinated by his second place on GC in Tirreno-Adriatico in 2021, a minute behind Tadej Pogačar (in the last season before Pogačar started targeting the classics in earnest) but three minutes ahead of everyone else.
I mention this all the time with Pogačar, but I was fixated on the divergence in men’s cycling between the cobbled classics and the grand tours. As of December 2023, the last rider to have won a cobbled monument and the GC at a grand tour was Sean Kelly, who won his second Paris-Roubaix title in 1986 and the Vuelta a España GC in 1988.
That last was itself a bit of an aberration; Kelly won the Vuelta back when the race was held in the spring, and the top GC riders in the world were not present. Greg LeMond was still recovering from his near-fatal hunting accident. Stephen Roche, fresh off the Triple Crown in 1987 was hurt. Andy Hampsten, Erik Breukink and Pedro Delgado all raced the Giro instead.
It would’ve taken something equally weird — weak startlist, favorable parcours, crashes, COVID, doping disqualifications, what have you — but three years ago I expected one rider to win a grand tour and a cobbled monument…let’s say by 2030.
I just didn’t know if it was going Pogačar or van Aert.
That uncertainty started to look foolish very quickly. A new slew of near-misses at monuments and world championships. A broken collarbone at Dwars Door Vlaanderen in 2024 that wiped out his classics season and derailed a planned for-shits-and-giggles run at GC at the Giro. It also left him out of form for the Tour — van Aert’s first since his debut in 2019 in which he failed to win a stage. Van Aert was able to come back to win three stages at the Vuelta, and he was set up to win the points classification there as well; winning the points classification at all three grand tours is as rare an accomplishment as van Aert could hope to achieve. Then he crashed again and abandoned the race.
All of a sudden, van Aert was on the wrong side of 30, and he’d gone from the best classics rider in the world to Mathieu van der Poel’s closest rival to the guy who finishes in Group 2 behind van der Poel and Pogačar. He was great in his prime because he was the second-best rider in the world in almost everything, but the great breadth of his skill meant his achievements far undersold his skill.
I’ll be honest: I thought van Aert was cooked. Occasionally, he’d conjure a throwback performance. There was the titanic pull he put in on the penultimate stage of the 2025 Giro to tow Simon Yates away from his squabbling pursuers for good. He went solo on the Montmartre to win the final stage of the 2025 Tour by 19 seconds over Pogačar and two others. But what used to be the norm was now a pleasant throwback. I saw Bruce Springsteen on the beach in Asbury Park in 2024; it was the best concert I’m ever likely to attend, but it probably would’ve been better in 1984.
In Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Flanders, van Aert got dropped easily. I never considered that he could handle Paris-Roubaix against a clearly in-form van der Poel and a transhuman Pogačar. Another strong top-five — the latest in a chain of dozens in races of this magnitude — seemed the most likely outcome.
This was the fastest Paris-Roubaix in history, and the bricks were not happy about it. I’d like to apologize to my Bluesky mutual who asked when to tune in. I consulted the ASO timetable and saw that their fastest estimate had the peloton coming through the Arenberg Forest, the first of three five-star sectors, at around 8:30 a.m., so I said if he tuned in by then he wouldn’t miss anything.
I was wrong. Pogačar flatted before the Arenberg, and while he made his way back to the peloton and ended up in the first half-dozen riders at the entrance to the sector, the world champion spent precious energy to get back into position when the peloton was at its fastest. Then, with van Aert at the front of the race and van der Poel tucked in behind him, disaster struck for the defending champion.
Halfway through the sector, van der Poel also flatted. There might not be a worse place for a mechanical on the entire World Tour. The road through the Arenberg is maybe 10 or 15 feet wide, nowhere near spacious enough to fit a team car through. The peloton is moving at lightning speed, stretched out to single file in some places, two or three abreast at most. And because this was the first competitive sector, the leading group contained nearly the entire peloton.
If van der Poel gets a flat tire or loses a gearshift on a flat highway in a small group, he could be in possession of a new bike and back on his way in 15 or 20 seconds. Smack dab in the middle of the Arenberg, he needed to swap bikes with a teammate — Jasper Philipsen, in this case — and hope to reconnect with a mechanic later on.
This was a massive blow to Alpecin-Premier Tech, because while any basket with van der Poel’s name on it at Paris-Roubaix would contain all the team’s eggs, Philipsen has finished second here twice. Had van der Poel crashed and abandoned, Philipsen would’ve continued in pursuit of van Aert and Pogačar and probably ended up in the top 10. Swapping bikes with van der Poel killed his race.
But when van der Poel started pedaling, his cleats wouldn’t fit Philipsen’s pedals, so they swapped bikes back again and van der Poel waited for his next teammate, Tibor del Grosso, who was able to swap front wheels with his team captain.
Del Grosso’s bike didn’t suit van der Poel either, and ultimately he waited for the team car, losing more than two minutes to the best riders in the world in the process. Not even van der Poel can overcome that.
The gremlins kept reaching up and biting wheels. Ganna needed a bike change. Pogačar hopped off and remounted once more with 71 kilometers to go, and within seconds of that bike change, van Aert also had a mechanical.
Before the bike changes, Pogačar and van Aert were riding together; Visma-Lease a Bike took a few extra seconds to get van Aert’s new ride ready, and the effect was like a slow pit stop in a car race. Van Aert would already need everything he had to stay with Pogačar; every watt he spent with his face in the wind chasing him down reduced his chance of winning from remote to trivial.
All the drama up the road allowed van der Poel to close the gap, miraculously, to less than 30 seconds. But with just over 50 kilometers to go, van Aert pulled one of my favorite moves into the four-star cobbled sector at Auchy-lez-Orchies à Bersée.
When approaching a decisive obstacle — whether a short, sharp hill or a cobbled sector — don’t attack when the road gets hard: Attack before. Build up momentum before speed gets harder to come by, and force your opponent to make up ground when it’s more difficult to spin the pedals.
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Pogačar, being Pogačar, did just that, and quickly. But van Aert’s effort quickly put paid to the rest of the leading group except for Pogačar and Mads Pedersen, and within a few minutes not even Pedersen could hold the wheel.
Behind, van der Poel was still strong, but he was stuck at between 20 and 40 seconds’ gap. And no one would help him. Not only is working with van der Poel at Paris-Roubaix an act of professional suicide in and of itself, Christophe Laporte, van Aert’s teammate, was clamped onto the back of Group 2 like a limpet. Anyone who worked with van der Poel would also be bringing a fresh Visma-Lease a Bike rider into the leading group, giving one of the three strongest remaining competitors an ally in the run to the finish.
So for almost an hour, van Aert and Pogačar traded spots in a two-man team time trial. I was convinced that van Aert was doing too much of the work; for the past six weeks I’ve been psyching myself up about Pogačar’s invincibility. You can’t work with him. It’s like making a deal with the Devil. Remco Evenepoel just tried to do it last week and he paid the price immediately; and nobody else in contention, not even van Aert, is as good as Remco right now.
The pace on the cobbles was lightning-fast, and it was obvious. Bikehandling, always a matter of victory or crashing in this race, once again proved decisive. Just before the five-star Mons-en-Pévèle sector, Ganna lost his back wheel and tumbled theatrically off his bike, looking like a Duke brother sliding over the hood of the General Lee. Van der Poel overcooked a corner while leading the chase group and ended up Talladegaing up and around a grassy berm, but he stayed upright.
Race after race, Pogačar culls the herd and launches one last long-range attack that shuts down the competition once and for all. He did it to van Aert at each of the past two monuments, and I expected it to happen in the final decisive cobbled sectors: the back-to-back four-star Camphin-en-Pévèle and five-stour Carrefour de l’Arbre.
Sure enough, van Aert and Pogačar tested each other, and Pogačar even got some daylight on the Carrefour de l’Arbre, but never more than a handful of bike lengths. With 17 kilometers left, Pogačar took a dusty left-hand sweeper with van Aert truly off his wheel. But he carried too much speed and his drive wheel slipped. Pogačar stayed right-side-up, but he reacted like anyone would after a near-miss like that: He was chastened, cautious, from then on.
At the same time, van Aert came steaming around the outside the line of the corner and got right back into Pogačar’s pocket.
It was at this point that a series of unexpected realizations occurred to me. Pogačar might be the best rider of all time, but van Aert is a better bikehandler than he is, and it’s not close. Van Aert is also a better flat-ground time trialist, which meant that if Pogačar couldn’t find a way to break van Aert before the end of the cobbles, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it on the asphalt between the end of the Carrefour de l’Arbre and the velodrome, either.
Because after the end of the Carrefour, there were only about 15 kilometers left in the race. Pogačar had needed hills to break van Aert at Ronde van Vlaanderen; none remained. More cobbles could’ve swung the race either way, but they would at least have given Pogačar another place to attack. The only ones left were relatively serene one- and two-star sections.
And if Pogačar went to the velodrome with van Aert, van Aert would be the overwhelming favorite in a heads-up sprint. Sure, anything can happen; van Aert has biffed a three-on-one sprint against Powless before. Kasper Asgreen, who accelerates like a continent, won Ronde van Vlaanderen in 2021 in a heads-up sprint because van der Poel hit the gas on the final straightaway and got the failing hyperdrive whine from the Millennium Falcon.
We didn’t know this at the time, but Visma-Lease a Bike was about to get an object lesson in not counting one’s chickens in the women’s race. Defending champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot was leading teammate Marianne Vos and Franziska Koch of FDJ-Suez into the velodrome. Koch had just dropped Ferrand-Prévot just outside the velodrome; Ferrand-Prévot clawed back into the leading group, and rather than come over the top or roll attacks with Vos in the hope of securing the win for the team, she got back on the front to lead Vos out, hoping to engineer a definitive first Paris-Roubaix win for the greatest rider in the history of women’s cycling.
It didn’t work. The leadout was mis-choreographed; Koch got in between the two teammates on the bell lap. Instead of punching through the air so Vos could jump out of her slipstream, Ferrand-Prévot peeled meekly off to the inside. Vos, rather than getting a tow from Koch as she started her sprint, edged around the outside as Koch was looking. A well-executed sprint not only involves accelerating first, it involves the element of surprise; Vos had neither. Koch was already responding by the time Vos started to draw level, and not even Vos could overcome that poor start.
So anything can happen in a sprint. Especially with Pogačar, the ultimate subverter of expectations, in the hunt.
But when van Aert got out of the Carrefour de l’Arbre in the lead and in one piece, I realized he was going to win Paris-Roubaix. The man who’d been second-best his entire career was suddenly on course of the biggest win of his life, because he was better than the greatest of all time in two or three specific circumstances.
The sprint was even less climactic than I had thought it would be; van Aert made Pogačar pull most of the way to Roubaix, got position on the bell lap, and rolled steadily away to win by daylight.(4)
As soon as van Aert pulled off into the infield, he tumbled off his bike, sat down, and burst immediately into tears.
Had Vos won Paris-Roubaix Femmes, it would’ve been a terrific, heartwarming moment, the sport’s most decorated star taking home the heaviest(5) trophy in classics racing. But the fact that Vos has never won Paris-Roubaix diminishes the race, not her. Women didn’t compete in the Hell of the North until 2021, when Vos was already 33 and her days of dominance were waning. It would’ve been nice to have a cobblestone in her trophy cabinet, sure, but with so many world championship jerseys and an Olympic gold medal already hanging there, I don’t think Vos will miss it much.
That’s not the case for van Aert. On some level, we all know the relief that comes with closing a stressful chapter of life. We’ve quit the shitty job, gotten out of the toxic relationship, finished the dissertation, sold the car that won’t stop breaking down. When you wake up each morning thinking “I can’t keep on living like this,” there’s an inexplicable feeling of freedom and lightness that comes on the morning you wake up and you no longer have to.
Van Aert was already a world cyclocross champion, and a winner of 14 individual grand tour stages and six Olympic and world championship road cycling medals. He’d already won a monument, but one of the most surprising things about his career is how little anyone seemed to care. Milan-San Remo is chaotic, and van Aert won it when no one was paying attention. Once the world tuned back in, van der Poel won eight monuments and a world championship. Evenepoel won two, plus four world championships and two Olympic gold medals. Pogačar won 12 monuments and two world championships, and seems likely to keep winning more until he gets sick of the feeling.
Between Milan-San Remo 2020 and Paris-Roubaix 2026, van Aert was on the podium at the Olympics, world championships, or the monuments 13 times, never on the top step. On seven of those occasions, one or more of Pogačar, Evenepoel or van der Poel was ahead of him.
Now, he’s won the biggest race of his career, at a point where his skills were supposed to be on the wane, and his opponents have never looked more inexorable. Finally, he stands alone.
And he looks like a new man.
Endnotes
(1) Look, I’m not laboring under any illusions here
(2) And maybe all art
(3) Which turned out to be a savvy move when Niewiadoma broke her years-long winless streak with huge triumphs at La Flèche Wallonne and, improbably, the Tour de France Femmes. Talk about subverting convention.
(4) Antonio Morgado speculated after the race that Pogačar was working on a flat tire in the final sprint, which would explain why the finale was so uncompetitive. Either way, van Aert had him beat.
(5) Both in mass and importance
