Key Takeaways: Gent-Wevelgem 2024
Breaking down how the key Tour of Flanders tune-up race was won and what we learned from Lidl-Trek's aggressive tactics against Mathieu van der Poel
Lidl-Trek delivered Mads Pedersen to victory at the prestigious cobbled Classic Gent-Wevelgem over the indomitable Mathieu van der Poel in a thrilling display of tactical prowess and raw physical strength through the green fields of Flanders. After his team perfectly executed a theoretically simple, but practically difficult, plan to isolate and constantly attack the heavy pre-race favorite on the exposed roads between the unforgiving cobbled climb of the Kemmelberg, Pedersen finished things off by burning the exhausted Van der Poel in an extremely long two-up sprint to take his second career win at the race and signal he should be considered a top tier favorite at the upcoming Tour of Flanders.
Gent-Wevelgem 2024 Top Ten
1) Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) +0
2) Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) +0
3) Jordi Meeus (BORA-hansgrohe) +16
4) Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) +16
5) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) +16
6) Olav Kooij (Team Visma-LAB) +16
7) Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty) +16
8) Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) +16
9) Dylan Groenewegen (Jayco-AlUla) +16
10) Matteo Trentin (Tudor) +16
Race Notebook
84km: On the first of three ascents of the race’s main climb, the Kemmelberg, Mathieu van der Poel attempts to recreate his dominance from Friday at E3 by significantly increasing the pace.
84km (top of Kemmelberg): The lifting of the pace immediately distances the majority of the peloton, but Lidl-Trek has two riders, Jasper Stuyven, and Mads Pedersen, right on his wheel, with a third, Jonathan Milan, just a few meters back.
83km: After an elite front group forms over the top of the climb, Milan smartly attacks and quickly pulls out a 10ish second advantage.
78km: Lidl-Trek having Milan off the front and two more riders in the chase group puts Van der Poel in an extremely tough situation. His two options are to get on the front and chase Milan, while giving Stuyven and Pedersen free rides, or sit up and wait for the peloton, who is 25 seconds back, and includes his teammate Jasper Philipsen. Van der Poel, perhaps due to the presence of difficult plugstreets (dirt path) that could serve as a launch pad for another attack up the road, decides to continue riding.
71km: Once on the first plugstreet, Van der Poel attacks. But, with Pedersen and Stuyven sitting in prior to the attack, they are able to respond.
64km: With the attack not being successful in shaking loose the two Lidl-Trek riders, Van der Poel continues riding in pursuit of Milan as they sit on. Stuyven flats out of this group shortly after this and returns to the peloton.
63km: Right before the chase closes in on Milan, Pedersen attacks, continuing the classic 1-2 attack pattern Lidl-Trek is following, betting that by forcing Van der Poel to constantly close down attacks while they sit on his wheel, they will be able to fatigue him before the finish line.
52km: On the second pass of the Kemmelberg, the tactic appears to be working as a visibly fatigued Van der Poel, who was the one attacking the last time up, now struggles to hold the wheel Pedersen and Pithie on the tough cobbled climb. Milan, who has done an impressive amount of work, is finally dropped.
46km: Meanwhile, back in the peloton, despite the leading trio being within touching distance just 26 seconds ahead, the sprinters’ teams are all sitting back in the bunch, likely hesitant to set a hard pace prior to the final pass of the Kemmelberg in case their sprinter is dropped. Instead, Ineos, who lacks a sprinter, has a single rider setting tempo at the front in an attempt to set up an attack heading into the climb, while Lidl-Trek masses at the front behind to block others from getting to the front to pull through.
34km: On the final ascent of the Kemmelberg, Pedersen once again sets an extremely high pace. Outside of confirming that he is the strongest rider in the group, thus giving him confidence in the sprint, it drops Laurence Pithie, who has an extremely fast sprint. Van der Poel and Pedersen have a 1’06 gap to the peloton over the top, which they stretch out to 1’32 in the ensuing kilometers.
19km-14km: On the flat run-in to the finish line, Pedersen and Van der Poel work together to keep the pace high in an effort to hold off the now-motivated sprinters’ team, who have slowly brought the gap down.
1km-400m: With their gap down to roughly 30 seconds, Pedersen stays on the front to keep the pace high heading into the final kilometer, and continues pulling Van der Poel into the final few hundred kilometers. While Pedersen being on the front looks risky, he almost certainly doesn’t want to contest a standing start sprint against his extremely explosive rival.
200m: Pedersen keeps rolling at a good clip until he opens up his sprint from an already high speed.
100m: Despite it briefly looking like Van der Poel will come by, he stalls out as Pedersen starts to pull away.
Finish: With Van der Poel conceding his loss and sitting up to roll across the line, Pedersen finishes off his 16-second sprint and celebrates his second career Gent victory.
Key Takeaways
1) Mads Pedersen: He may have looked slightly off his best over the last week after slightly disappointing performances at Milano-Sanremo and E3, but, as is usually the case, Pedersen was his best at the end of the hardest, longest race of the bunch. After 5.5 hours of racing that was made as difficult as possible by his Lidl-Trek team, Pedersen impressively led out a two-up sprint against an incredibly explosive rival before dispatching him en route to his World Tour-leading seventh win of 2024.
At this point, it is clear that Pedersen gets better the harder race and worse at the weather, and Sunday was no exception. After surviving Van der Poel’s attacks on the first pass of the Kemmelberg and on the plugstreets, he seemed to sense his superiority on the day and took that confidence into the sprint.
It may have looked strange to see Pedersen willingly leading into the final kilometer, but he did so for two reasons:
1) Keep the pace from stalling out and the group from coming back together. While Van der Poel certainly wanted to win, with a sprinter in Philipsen chasing just a few second back, he could have afforded to let the pace stall out and give Philipsen a chance to sprint for the win.
2) The key to beating Van der Poel in these two-up sprints is to keep the pace from getting too low and launching from extremely far out. Van der Poel’s massive explosive ability means he is incredibly good at high-torque, low-speed sprints (see: 2023 Cyclocross World Champ), but much more beatable high-speed, longer sprints (see: 2021 Tour of Flanders).
The 28-year-old former World Champion might not be mentioned in the same tier as riders like Wout van Aert and Van der Poel, but since 2022, he has been winning at a rate that not only challenges, but actually surpasses them.
Since the start of the 2022 season, he has 23 victories, including ten WorldTour races and six Grand Tour stages.
In compassion, over the same time period Van Aert has 16 total wins, with ten WorldTour wins, and three Grand Tour stage wins, while Van der Poel has 12 total wins, with six WorldTour wins and one Grand Tour stage win.
2) Lidl-Trek: The team, which has taken a massive step up in 2024, perfectly executed a simple yet bold pre-race plan. Isolating the favorite before using your numerical advantage to roll attacks on them while the others sit in the wheels before using your strongest rider to attack/outsprint them isn’t a particularly advanced strategy, but the execution, especially against a rider as strong as Van der Poel, is far from easy.
Outside of the physical challenge of taking the race to Van der Poel, the mental one is equally, if not more, difficult.
It is even more impressive when considering that their aggressive racing on Friday at E3 resulted in Van der Poel riding clear for a definitive solo victory and looking as close to unbeatable as is possible in the process.
But, while the strategy may have been bold, it undeniably worked, and the multiple attacks of Van der Poel, and putting him in positions where he had to work on the front while Pedersen sat in the wheels, appeared to wear him down to the point where Pedersen could outsprint him.
The race was won between 84km-to-go and 52km-to-go when Lidl-Trek got three riders over the Kemmelberg, launched Milan off the front, and forced Van der Poel to reel him in before rotating attacks until the second time up the climb.
With Visma struggling since their dominant opening Classics weekend, Lidl-Trek is coming into focus as the strongest cobbled team of 2024 and, as a result, will likely be the main obstacle between Van der Poel and a third Flanders victory.
Expect them to run back this strategy next weekend at Flanders, and with in-form riders like Pedersen, Stuyven, and Toms Skujiņš, it isn’t impossible to imagine them getting multiple options into the decisive final pass of the Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg.
3) Mathieu van der Poel: He raced aggressively and attempted to run the same ‘attack, attack, and attack before getting away clear for a solo win’ that he did on Friday at E3, but he didn’t look quite as strong on Sunday, which was the difference between riding clear while looking unstoppable to being worked over by Lidl-Trek and losing a two-up sprint.
Van der Poel could easily recover to win his third Tour of Flanders on Sunday, but Gent showed the blueprint for defeating the superstar and showing how a rider can go from looking unbeatable early in the Flemish Holy Week to being defeated just a few days later.
It is worth noting that in the past two years, Wout van Aert has looked peerless at E3, but has failed to carry that form into the Monuments just a few weeks later, which is a good reminder that being in peak race fitness early in this block isn’t always the ideal strategy.
One major lingering question is why Van der Poel decided to work with the Stuyven/Pedersen group to chase Milan after the first climb of the Kemmelberg instead of simply sitting up to wait for the peloton, which included Alpecin teammates, including Jasper Philipsen, who would likely have been the favorite to win had it come down to a bunch sprint.
Perhaps Van der Poel thought the plugstreets and two more passes of the Kemmelberg gave him plenty of chances to attack and ride away for the win, but by the second time up the climb, it was clear that Pedersen was the stronger rider and couldn’t be dropped.
Even though he still had a chance at winning a two-up sprint against Pedersen, it was clear he was the underdog after the last climb.
Instead of working, the tactic that would have given Alpecin the highest chance of winning the race would have been for Van der Poel to sit on Pedersen’s wheel and either force him to pull all the way to the finish line, where Van der Poel would have had a much greater chance of winning, or sit up and wait to be caught, which would have actually been the outcome that maximized Alpecin’s odds of winning due to Philipsen’s strong form in recent weeks.
4) Alpecin-Deceuninck: While they have looked great in recent weeks, and used perfectly executed teamwork to win Milano-Sanremo, it is becoming clear that they don’t have the depth of the type of riders who can make it deep into hilly cobbled Classics to support Van der Poel.
As Lidl-Trek showed today, Van der Poel can be isolated on tough Cobbled climbs and forced into extremely difficult situations on the flatter stretches of roads in between, and that he will willingly fall into this trap, even if he has safety in the form of teammates chasing behind, since he has had so much success with this ultra-aggressive racing in the past.
5) The Sprinters: A lot has been made of the declining role of the traditional sprinter in modern cycling, but during an extremely hard ultra-long Classic that broke up early in the crosswinds, we saw some of the purest sprinters in the sport (Dylan Groenewegen and Tim Merlier), within just a few seconds of returning the race, which has traditionally belonged to sprinters, back to the domain of the fastmen.
Additionally, Jonathan Milan, who just a few years ago would likely have been seen as a one-trick pony only capable of burning off competitors in the final straight (a la Marcel Kittel), was on the attack and racing more like a Classics specialist than a traditional sprinter.
This shows us that as the sport evolves and races get faster and more taxing, instead of simply dying out, sprinters are evolving as well and getting more and more creative about creating their own chances.
However, despite their near chance, one big lingering potential regret for the sprinters and their teams will be the decision not to get to the front before the final climb of the Kemmelberg and to let the pace stagnate. This lull in the racing made the difference between Van der Poel and Pedersen staying away and being caught.
Perhaps teams like QuickStep and Intermarché were concerned about burning riders, including their own sprinters, before the Kemmelberg, or working only for others to win, if they could have kept the gap to the leaders around 30 seconds instead of over a minute, they would have had a chance at winning, instead of watching the race win ride clear, leaving the fighting for scraps.
Great commentary Spencer. As a sidenote, it’s really weird that Max had E3, but not this race or Flanders. I can’t believe all of my back door efforts to get a Eurosport account failed. I’m usually good at that stuff. I had to subscribe to FLO. 😢
I don’t understand the need to use the word plugstreet.