Second to none, and second to everyone

Gruber Images

With 800 meters remaining in the 80th Dwars door Vlaanderen, Wout van Aert must have allowed himself a brief moment of belief. He had been alone since the Eikenberg, 40 kilometers from home, and nobody was coming. Then somebody was.

"It's cursed here," Van Aert said to Visma team cameras just past the finish line.

Filippo Ganna changed bikes twice in the same race, lost contact with the front on the day's decisive climb, and still came back to catch a man who had been soloing for the better part of an hour. He hit Van Aert's rear wheel with 150 meters to go and was past him at 100. Van Aert’s head dropped as he fought on, crossing the finish line in second, ahead of the chasing peloton but behind the man with his hands in the air. Again.

In the glowing, chaotic halls of the bike race Internet, they have a word for it now, said with a wince and smile. Wouth Place. The podium step, or just off the podium step sometimes, that has become his home address.

Not so long ago, this was not the story. There were two colossi at the top of the sport: Van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel; the question of who was better felt genuinely open. They had been rivals since the junior cyclocross circuit, sitting next to each other in their zits and braces eras on a Sporza set fifteen years ago. Two teenagers in the mud of Flanders who seemed destined to spend their careers locked in beautiful, exhausting combat.

Then Van der Poel kept winning Monuments, eight in total now. Tadej Pogačar took his inimitable powers from the smooth roads of the Grand Tours and applied them to the cobbles and hills of northern Europe with the appetite of someone who had run out of mountains to conquer. And Van Aert ran into a fence at the Tour de France and sliced his leg open. A crash here at Dwars in 2024 fractured his collarbone and ribs and ended his spring. A broken ankle cut short his cyclocross season this winter.

I do not think Wout van Aert wants us to feel bad for him, but it is at times difficult not to. The body that was once his greatest weapon has become, in recent years, a liability he carries into every race. "He knocks on the door so often,” Neilson Powless said to Het Niewusblad. “And it doesn't always open."

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content

Subscribe now