Wout van Aert Forever

Before Sunday, Wout van Aert's professional cycling career looked most like a testament to the irresistible force of entropy. Before Sunday, the Belgian had never won either of the two biggest one-day races on the calendar, suffering untimely crashes and mechanicals, always seeming to get injured at the wrong time, and occasionally being a victim of his own strength, the sort of rider nobody would work with. Before Sunday, van Aert's glaring inability to win Paris-Roubaix—the race that means the most both to him personally and to Belgian fans collectively—despite finishing in the top 10 all the time, and looking like one of the most talented and natural bike riders of his generation, had begun to feel like it would be the first line when the story of his career was written. Before Sunday, you could look at van Aert as a tragic figure, haunted by the twinned misfortune of regular-old bad luck on the bike and the bad timing of happening to race at the same time as Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogacar. Before Sunday, you could get away with saying "Wouth Place," to denote a specifically van Aertian genre of bungled win. Before Sunday, you could look at van Aert—world cyclocross champion, one-time Monument winner, author of defining Tour de France performances—and see a rider who could have been more, a 31-year-old who wasted the best chances he would ever get to take a career-defining win. Before Sunday, you could read van Aert's 10 top-10s and zero wins at the two cobbled Monuments as a reminder of cycling's cruelty and painfulness, that losing is the background radiation of the sport and that winning offers but a temporary escape. After Sunday, nobody will ever look at Wout van Aert that way again.