The duel was expected, it did not disappoint. Under the red flame, one kilometer from the finish in Oudenaarde of the 106th Tour of Flanders, Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel stopped. In a moment of tightrope walking, like two track racers, the two heroes of the day this Sunday gauged each other before the final sprint. A moment suspended for a little too long, because a few turns of the pedal from the line, after 272 kilometers of racing, the duettists saw another tandem descend on them: the Dutchman Dylan van Baarle and the Frenchman Valentin Madouas, whom they had released earlier. It was therefore in a four-man sprint that Mathieu van der Poel triumphed to win the second Tour of Flanders of his career.
But it was indeed a showdown between two giants that amazed Flanders, dressed for the occasion in their finest finery: cherry blossoms, a mild sky, which only reserved a few tears for the finish, and a dense crowd in the decisive mountains that punctuate the race. In the absence of the Belgian champion, Wout van Aert, favorite of the Flemish people and forecasters, forfeited at the last moment due to Covid-19, the battle was planned between Van der Poel and Pogacar.
The first, Dutch, is a cyclocross cador who also knows how to be very comfortable on the road, a pure product of the history of European cycling, son of Adrie van der Poel (winner of the Tour of Flanders in 1986 and Liège -Bastogne-Liège two years later) and grandson of Raymond Poulidor (we do not list his prize list, which does not only include places of two). The second, Slovenian, is the new extraterrestrial of cycling: double winner of the Tour de France before his 23 years, he has recently tried the classics, in which the riders of the great tours are not the most expected. Nothing to scare him: last year, he piled up two Monuments (Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Tour de Lombardie), awakening comparisons that we no longer thought possible with the Eddy Merckx myth.
For a Homeric fight, you need a ring to match. On the Tour of Flanders, it is made up of heaps of cobblestones that defy the expression “Plat Pays”. After 220 race markers, two of these mountains followed one another: Old Kwaremont and Paterberg. The first is not very steep (4% on average) but long (more than 2 and a half terminals) and above all paved over the majority of its route (1.6 km). The second is shorter (400 meters) but much steeper (12.5% average) and, of course, entirely paved. From this passage from Charybdis to Scylla, only the bravest can escape. It was necessary to achieve this twice, this Sunday, since the course repeated the sequence in the last 50 kilometers.
Cheeky as usual, Pogacar lit the first rocket from the first diptych, in the Old Quaremont, going up in a pedal stroke the fifteen runners who had escaped earlier in the day. In his wheel: Kasper Asgreen, the winner of last year and Van der Poel. When they presented themselves again at the foot of this climb, Tadej Pogacar did it again. Of the small group still present, only Mathieu Van der Poel managed to follow. In the village of Quaremont, there are only the two of them. Alone in the world, alone in the Round. Here they are now in the Paterberg, shoulder to shoulder but in two radically opposed styles: the aerial pedal for the elf Pogacar, the shoulders rolling like a heavyweight boxer for Van der Poel. The pugilist and the tightrope walker fail to get rid of each other and thirteen terminals later, it is the most powerful who will win the bouquet. After the first laurels gleaned in 2020 and a second place last year, the 27-year-old runner is asserting himself as a Flandrian monster.
Among the women, who arrived an hour after the men, the legend Annemiek van Vleuten, 39, failed to win her third Tour of Flanders. To the delight of the locals, the Dutch was beaten in the sprint by the Belgian champion, Lotte Kopecky. The 26-year-old runner, until recently classified as a sprinter, is increasingly asserting herself as an all-terrain cyclist. A month ago, the Belgian won the Strade Bianche in Siena, another bumpy race. She was already ahead of a certain Van Vleuten.