Key Takeaways: Gent-Wevelgem & Volta Catalunya

Breaking down if Gent-Wevelgem showed us if anyone can possibly challenge the Van der Poel/Pogačar Classics duopoly & a vintage Primož Roglič performance at Catalunya

Mads Pedersen foiled a field of the sport’s top sprinters to seal his second consecutive victory at the prestigious cobbled Classic Gent-Wevelgem on Sunday. Up against a fleet of faster finishers, including his Lidl-Trek teammates Jonathan Milan, Pedersen leveraged the hard racing and splintered peloton to launch an extremely long-range move that saw him easily bridge up to the breakaway before riding clear on the unforgiving cobbled climb of the Kemmelberg with just under 60 kilometers remaining. The display of tactical prowess, raw physical strength, and self-confidence, to tie the overall career win record at Gent-Wevelgem, means that he has to now be considered the only rider capable of challenging the two Galácticos, Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar, at the upcoming Tour of Flanders.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Primož Roglič, after having his back against the wall and needing to take time back on a formidable Juan Ayuso to win the overall, deftly dismantled his young GC rival on multiple laps of the Montjuic circuit to take an incredibly impressive solo stage win that propelled him to his 17th career WorldTour stage race victory, which has him looking like the clear favorite for the upcoming Giro d’Italia and cemented his status as one of the greatest stage racers of his generation.

Check out the key highlights and condensed key takeaways from the busy weekend below:

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Gent-Wevelgem

2025 Top Ten
1) Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) +0
2) Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) +49
3) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) +49
4) Alexander Kristoff (Uno-X Mobility) +49
5) Hugo Hofstetter (Israel-Premier Tech) +49
6) Davide Ballerini (XDS Astana) +49
7) Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty) +49
8) Jenno Berckmoes (Lotto) +49
9) Jordi Meeus (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +49
10) Laurenz Rex (Intermarché-Wanty) +49

Race Notebook
108km-to-go: Before the race even hits the hilly section of the course, the peloton is breaking up and re-forming in the crosswinds under pressure from teams like RedBull-Bora, Ineos, and Lidl-Trek.

72km: With the peloton under immense and constant pressure leading into the succession of plugstreets, Mads Pedersen sees an opportunity to catch out the faster sprinters by attacking. Unfortunately, the only two riders able to follow him are Jasper Philipsen and Dylan Groenewegen, both of whom could beat him in the sprint for the win.

69km-60km: However, as the Plugstreet section ends, Pedersen is suddenly alone and surging off the front after Philipsen suffers a flat tire and Groenewegen crashes. In less than 10km, he bridges the 50-second gap to the breakaway, which increases its gap to the peloton to a minute.

56km: When the breakaway hits the Kemmelberg, Visma’s Victor Campenaerts immediately begins pressing the pace on the front, but when they hit the hardest section, Pedersen rides clear of Campenaerts, Tudor’s Marco Haller and Lotto’s Arjen Livyns.

51km-47km: Even with the three-rider chase group just a few seconds back, Pedersen presses over the top, which quickly extends his lead out to 30 seconds over them, and over a minute to the peloton behind, which is more interested in launching attacks and counter-attacks than putting together an organized chase. At this point, even if it seems too difficult for Pedersen to hold off a large peloton, the lack of cooperation and presence of superstar sprinters like Philipsen mean that it will be even harder for the peloton to find consensus to chase him down.

35km-33km: When Pedersen clears the last pass of the Kemmelberg with a two-minute gap over the peloton, which is being attacked by Philipsen, who is presumably trying to drop the other sprinters, it is clear he is going to win.

18km-9.9km: After nursing Tim Merlier back to the front, Soudal-QuickStep joins Alpecin in chasing Pedersen, but both his strength and time cushion are too much to overcome. With under 10km remaining, his gap is still nearly 90 seconds.

Finish: Pedersen crosses the finish line for his second consecutive, and third career, Gent-Wevelgem victory, while Merlier wins the sprint for second ahead of Pedersen’s Lidl-Trek Jonathan Milan, who fades slightly after an extremely long sprint.

Key Takeaways

Mads Pedersen’s Dominant Ride Highlights His Position as The Forgotten Galáctico: The 29-year-old former World Champion continued his domination of a race that he has quietly come to “own” by winning his third career title at Gent-Wevelgem, tying the all-time career win record with legends such as Peter Sagan, Eddy Merckx, and Tom Boonen. This quiet dominance is a cornerstone of Pedersen’s brand, but it hides some hugely impressive tallies and his high-ceiling physical abilities.

• For example, despite being a year younger, he has more career victories than Wout van Aert (50 vs. 49), and his long-range move today showed that he is in the truly elite tier of riders, with Mathieu van der Poel, Remco Evenepoel, and Tadej Pogačar, who have proven they can take a massive swing with a solo move in a top one-day race and convert their ultra-long-range attacks into wins.

• However, despite his statement win on Sunday and this record of success, it is difficult to imagine him replicating this ride against Van der Poel and Pogačar at Flanders or Roubaix since they can stick to the same moves, just with more power.

  • For example, on Friday at E3, Pedersen put in a similar effort but finished a minute behind Van der Poel. Unless he can get out in front of the two big favorites on Sunday at Flanders before things kick off (like he did last year), we have plenty of data points that tell us he won’t be able to stay with them when the winning move(s) go on late climbs like the Oude Kwaremont.

Lidl-Trek’s Depth Meant Pedersen Not Only Could, but Had To, Risk It to Win: If Pedersen’s attack looked overly bold, even irresponsible, in reality, it was set up for success well before he ripped off the front. With the peloton splitting up multiple times before the race even hit the plugstreets or began its multiple ascents of the Kemmelberg, Pedersen knew that even though there was technically still a long way to go to the finish, that the peloton behind so disorganized and the legs of his rivals would be so sapped, that the sight of a peloton chasing a single rider was more of a disadvantage in an optical sense than in reality.

• Also, Pedersen could take comfort in the knowledge that if he stayed in the group, the presence of Jonathan Milan meant that he would not be his team’s option to contest the win. So, in essence, in order to even have a chance to contest the win, he needed to get out in front of the group as early as possible.

  • Additionally, his daring move was only a portion of his Lidl-Trek team’s strategy, since even if Pedersen’s move failed and he was caught, his Lidl-Trek team would have been in the best possible position to win since team, and sprinter, Milan, would have been protected in the wheels for 60 kilometers.

The Placement of Climbs & Hard Racing Left the Chase Group With Few Good Options: While it was easy to spray blame around the inept chase group behind Pedersen, there were multiple dynamics at play that doomed their ability to reel in the leader.

• The presence of multiple ascents of the Kemmelberg, especially the final one with roughly 30kms remaining, meant that the teams of most sprinters weren’t able to get to the front to press the pace until they nursed their fastmen over the climb.

  • For example, had Soudal-QuickStep gotten to the front to set a hard pace the moment Pedersen went clear, it would have only benefitted Philipsen, who would have then had a better chance of dropping a fatigued Merlier on the Kemmelberg, before winning a reduced sprint.

  • And while Visma, with Dylan Groenewegen in the race, may have been a natural ally to help peg back Pedersen, they have already slipped Campenaerts up into the breakaway, and once Groenewegen crashed out, they had no incentive to help teams with supersonic sprinters like Milan, Merlier, and Philipsen.

    • However, even with the unfortunate mid-race loss of Groenewegen, it was still odd to watch Visma, the team that has dominated these semi-classics in recent years, look rudderless and as though they had no real plan B after Campenaerts was dropped.

Solo Rides Are Winning More & More Often: It may have looked like the chase group was shooting itself in the foot, but it is worth pointing out that modern races, which see higher, more intense racing from further and further from the finish line, can actually tip the scales in favor of the solo rider.

• While the rider off the front has their incentives fully aligned (they only have to ride as hard as possible to win), the group behind has to negotiate with a fatigued chase group and navigate multiple overlapping incentives.

  • Being forced to strike alliances with untrusting opponents, who know that the less they work, the better their chances of winning, contributes to the start-stop attack-heavy chase groups we now often see behind the solo riders off the front.

    • The fact that 16 out of the last 20 major one-day races (Monuments, Olympics & World Championships) have been won by solo riders, suggest this is true, and that their increased frequency is here to stay as stronger teams and riders realize it’s in their best interest to make the race as hard as possible before launching their top rider off the front.

Volta Catalunya

Final GC Top Five
1) Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +0
2) Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) +28
3) Enric Mas (Movistar) +53
4) Mikel Landa (Soudal Quick-Step) +54
5) Lenny Martinez (Bahrain-Victorious) +1’00

Catch up on the action from earlier in the races:
Volta Catalunya (Stages 3 & 4)

Stage 7
20.7km to go: With Roglič needing to take at least a second to overtake race leader Juan Ayuso, he takes over from his RedBull-Bora-hansgrohe team, who has been softening the competition with a high pace, and begins seriously pressing the pace on the fourth pass of the short, but steep, Montjuic climb.

20.7km cont: While both Egan Bernal and Ayuso are able to mark Roglič on the climb itself, they lose contact when they take a right-hand turn at the summit. Roglič presses his advantage over the top and immediately pulls out a large gap thanks to a combination of start-stop attacking in the group behind and others looking to Ayuso, who was clearly struggling, to nail back the gap.

5km: While Roglič’s gap never expands, and starts to shrink down to near single digits on the final pass of the climb, his high-pace steady-state riding vs the attacking behind, means that the gap is never fully closed.

Finish: Roglič’s daredevil descending sees him extend his lead back to 14 seconds as he heads down to the finish line, and he rolls to the line with plenty of time to celebrate his second career Catalunya overall title, and 11th career overall win in the Big Seven one-week stage races. Despite sitting up, he still wins with a 14-second gap on the hard-chasing Laurens de Plus (Ineos), which shows us just how much time he gained on the descent.

Key Takeaway

Primož Roglič is a Cold-Blooded Winning Machine: At this point, there is nothing left to say about the 35-year-old stage racing maestro. Despite coming off a slightly down 2024 (where he still won the Vuelta a España) and being up against a 22-year-old phenomenon in Juan Ayuso, who appeared uncrackable on the climbs and nearly unbeatable in the sprint, he went out on a short, punchy course that didn’t particularly lend itself for GC time gaps, and rode clear of a strong group despite everyone knowing he had to attack and drop Ayuso.

• If one needed to explain the greatness of Roglič, this Catalunya, where he recovered from losing the first summit finish by chipping into Ayuso’s lead by taking small bunches of time bonus seconds with his finishing speed, before delivering a knockout blow with his superior fitness and time trialing ability, perfectly sums it up.

  • The ride was also notable in that it saw Roglič, who is known for sitting in and saving energy until blasting away for uphill stage wins inside the final few hundred meters, saw him launch a rare long-range attack (the second-longest of his career and longest since 2018) that ensured he would carve out the needed time over Ayuso even if he was caught by a chasing group of stage-hunters.

    • The ability to hold off an extremely strong chase group, while the others behind struggled to drop each other, tells us that Roglič is near career-best form, which is key since he is building up to a Giro d’Italia where he will face his Catalunya rival Ayuso, a strong Egan Bernal, and a handful of other top GC contenders like Adam Yates.

• In an age where youth talent and the promise of future results are obsessed over, Roglič, who bucks this trend by being an older, quiet rider people tend to forget about, is racking up a historic number of wins.

  • Through his last 24 WorldTour stage race finishes (going back to the spring of 2018), Roglič has 17 wins (for an absurd 71% win rate), and has only finished off the podium four times (83% podium rate).

    • Combined with the fact that he has won six out of the sport’s seven top one-week stage races, makes it clear he is the best stage racer in history to have not (yet) won the Tour de France.