Key Takeaways: Amstel Gold 2024
Breaking down how a tactically tricky and physically difficult course finally foiled Mathieu van der Poel and his formerly unstoppable Classics team
Tom Pidcock deftly navigated the short yet never-ending hills and ample twists and turns of The Netherlands’s Limburg region to take one of the biggest wins of his career out of an elite front group that held off a fast-closing peloton on the deceptively difficult final straight. Marc Hirschi and Tiesj Benoot rounded out the podium, while ascendant youngsters Mauri Vansevenant and Paul Lapeira grabbed the rest of the top five, with Mathieu van der Poel and his dominant Alpecin-Deceuninck team finally appearing mortal as they fell prey to the notoriously difficult and tactical Amstel course. I’ve broken down the key moments and takeaways from the race below:
Amstel Gold 2024 Top Ten:
1) Thomas Pidcock (Ineos) +0
2) Marc Hirschi (UAE) +0
3) Tiesj Benoot (Visma-LAB) +0
4) Mauri Vansevenant (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
5) Paul Lapeira (Decathlon-AG2R) +0
6) Valentin Madouas (Groupama-FDJ) +0
7) Bauke Mollema (Lidl-Trek) +0
8) Quentin Pacher (Groupama-FDJ) +0
9) Pello Bilbao (Bahrain-Victorious) +0
10) Michael Matthews (Jayco-Alula) +11
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Amstel Gold Race Notebook
43.7km: With the early breakaway caught and attacks flying (Paul Lapeira and Mikkel Frølich Honoré have attacked and are off the front) Michał Kwiatkowski attacks on one of the race’s seemingly endless short, punchy climbs. Despite him not being one of the pre-race favorites, Mathieu van der Poel jumps out of the group to mark him personally.
43.6km: While this initially reads as Van der Poel using Kwiatkowski as a springboard, he slows up and waits for the others as soon as he closes the gap. Notice Pidcock sitting right behind Van der Poel as he sits on Kwiatkowski’s wheel.
38.6km: Alpecin puts their remaining team on the front to close down the gap to Lapeira and Honoré. While they successfully close the gap to below ten seconds, it comes at the expense of their numbers as their domestiques begin to fall away.
36km: With Alpecin getting the gap down to just eight seconds, Richard Carapaz attempts to jump across. Again, Van der Poel marks the move, but doesn’t relay through to get up to the leaders with Carapaz, which eventually kills the move. Also, notice Pidcock on Jorgenson’s wheel right behind Van der Poel.
35.2km: With the pace gone from the peloton but the gap still hovering under ten seconds, the situation is extremely combustible and must be managed carefully by Van der Poel, who is now without teammates (this is why you don’t have your team pull back a gap to less than ten seconds if you don’t intend to jump across yourself). UAE’s Marc Hirschi reads the situation perfectly and takes advantage of it by attacking, which leads to a flurry of other strong riders following him.
33km: With the leaders so close and Alpecin lacking the numbers to control the peloton, attacks keep coming, with multiple groups threatening to close down the leaders while Van der Poel sits fairly deep in the peloton.
30.3km: Recognizing that Van der Poel’s lack of response is likely a sign that he isn’t on his best day and that this is the final chance to join the lead group, Tom Pidcock and Tiesj Benoot slip out of the peloton. Considering the fact are two major pre-race favorites and that their presence up the road means they will refuse to work in the peloton, this is the now-or-never moment for Van der Poel to make a move to stay in contention for the win. However, surprisingly, he is still sitting far back in the peloton.
29.2km: Pidcock and Benoot make contact with the chase group, and which quickly catches the leaders and begins to put immense pressure on the peloton behind.
18.6km-13.2km: With the front group pulling the gap out to 44 seconds, Hirschi begins to ride incredibly aggressively by repeatedly attacking the front group (which actually increases cohesion due to dropping sprinters and freeloaders). This attacking eventually creates an elite front group.
11.4km: Back in the peloton, EF, who is no longer represented up front due to Honoré being dropped, is setting the pace in an attempt to deliver Marijn van den Berg to the finish line in a bunch sprint, but the gap isn’t significantly decreasing to the motivated and cohesive leaders, with all pulling through at full speed to keep the second group, which includes the fast young Frenchman, Paul Lapeira, off the back.
200m: The front group’s cohesion proves to be key as they enter the final straight, with the second group closing in on them while the peloton chases just 11 seconds further back. Tiesj Benoot opens up the sprint early in an attempt to catch the others out, and, not wanting to take any chances, Tom Pidcock responds right away.
Finish: Pidcock is able to leverage his superior speed to pull in front of Benoot and hold off a fast-closing Hirschi to take his first career Amstel win and complete his career podium sweep.
Three Key Takeaways
1) Tom Pidcock & Ineos: The 24-year-old cross-discipline star netted what was likely the biggest win of his career with an incredibly savvy ride where he read the race perfectly where he seemed to recognize and took advantage of a slightly off-the-pace Van der Poel. And, instead of getting caught in the ‘chase, close, chase, close’ cycle that Van der Poel did, he simply sat back and let his Ineos team soften up his biggest rival before executing a perfectly timed bridge to the winning move at the last possible moment.
While sitting and waiting for a winning move to materialize before closing it at the last second is risky, it allowed Pidcock to avoid wasting energy by jumping into moves over and over again, and allowed him to ensure the move was likely to stick before burning any matches.
And, once he was up the road, he struck the perfect balance between sitting back and allowing Hirschi to expend a significant amount of energy breaking up the group and pitching in with strong pulls to ensure they could keep the dropped riders and peloton off the back.
The win allowed Pidcock to rectify the mess of the 2021 edition of this race, where a botched finish-line photo setup left the official outcome, which had Wout van Aert finishing ahead of Pidcock, in doubt at best, and just plain wrong at worst, and means in just four career starts, he has finished on every step of the podium (2024: 1st, 2023: 3rd, 2021: 2nd).
This excellent career record at Amstel is likely due to his superior bike handling ability that allows him to save energy on every corner, of which there are many, allowing him to have a major advantage over the rest toward the end of the race.
Outside of highlighting Pidcock’s talent, the win has somewhat paradoxically highlighted the oddity of a four-year-old road career, where, despite looking like a superstar at times, he has seen him rack up five professional wins and three at the world level.
If Pidcock focuses on the road after his attempt to win his second career Olympic Mountain Bike race this summer, today’s ride, combined with his extremely consistent career Classics record (12 career top fives at Big 12 One-Day Classics) tells us we could see a rival to the sport’s top current one-day riders.
The win was key for his Ineos team, which netted a much-needed victory due to Pidcock’s focused and cerebral ride. In fact, after a disappointing 2024 so far, Pidcock’s win netted the team only its second WorldTour-level win this season and rescued its Classics season in one fell swoop.
Even with the team sporting a seemingly scattered roster with overall strategy, Pidcock’s win highlights the fact that underneath all of this, they still have an extremely high level of talent under contract that can emerge to pull out major wins.
2) Mathieu van der Poel & Alpecin-Deceuninck: Just as everyone was ready to pencil in Van der Poel and his Alpecin-Deceuninck team to win the remainder of the 2024 calendar, Amstel once again emerged to show us that the combination of the leg-breaking course (6 hours of racing with over 12,000 feet of climbing) without long climbs or cobbled sectors to completely blow the race to pieces can expose even the strongest team and riders.
In fact, Van der Poel, who appeared to be winding up to unleash yet another vicious solo attack when he began closely marking Michael Kwiatkowski, ended up riding an extremely odd race where he appeared to closely follow moves from his B and C level rivals while allowing the most dangerous riders in the race to ride clear while he sat back in the bunch.
For example, Van der Poel marked Carapaz and Kwiatkowski while watching Pidcock and Benoot, both leaders on two of the race’s strongest teams, ride clear to bridge to the already dangerous late-race move.
While Van der Poel explained this away by saying he was merely rolling the dice on a day when he didn’t have his best legs, this still leaves questions unanswered since even if his ‘sit tight’ strategy had worked, he would have gone to the line in a sprint against faster riders like Michael Matthews and Marijn van den Berg.
Additionally, while Alpecin could not take a step wrong between Flanders and Roubaix, Amstel exposed a few seams in the machine.
After having Van der Poel, not his teammates, close down early attacks, they burned through their entire team to nearly close the gap to the Lapeira and Honoré escape group, only to see Van der Poel unwilling to make the jump across and setting up a scenario where the eventual winning move was created.
This begs the question of why, if Van der Poel wasn’t on his best day, the team deployed its resources in this manner instead of changing gears on the fly, sitting back, and focusing on keeping teammates around Van der Poel until as late in the race as possible.
3) The eventual podium created a unique racing situation: One of the main reasons the lead group was willing and able to work together so seamlessly and was so difficult to bring back was its composition. The group lacked a rider with a track record of winning from small groups in volume, creating a rare scenario where everyone was likely happy with the result they generated.
Even with Pidcock’s quick finish, his inconsistency when it comes to winning left just enough for Hirschi, Benoot, and Mauri Vansevenant to work with him.
Also, after losing to Pidcock in the sprint, Marc Hisrchi, who got his first podium finish at a major one-day race since 2020, and Benoot, who lacks the sprint to reliably win against even small groups yet netted Visma’s first non-Wout van Aert podium in a one-day Classic since February, were likely very happy with their results.