"It's almost laughable... how can this happen?" - Wout van Aert denied sprint opportunity as the peloton gets lost on chaotic stage 1 of 2025 Volta ao Algarve

There was an utterly farcical end to the opening stage of the 2025 Volta ao Algarve on Wednesday afternoon in Portugal. More than half the peloton got lost heading into the finishing straight, with Team Visma | Lease a Bike superstar Wout van Aert among them.

"Did I also take a wrong turn? Yes, I followed the men in front of me, right?" laughs the 30-year-old Belgian in post-stage quotes collected by Sporza, explaining his confusion in the finale. "This must be a human error. Someone must have been misinformed at that last roundabout. It's almost laughable. At first I thought: how can this happen? I assumed that there would be a chicane somewhere that we didn't know about, but 300 meters from the finish suddenly all kinds of people were signalling that we had to be careful. So I paid attention."

In the end, Filippo Ganna crossed the line first, almost completely on his lonesome in a bizarre finale. So does Van Aert put the chaos simply down to human error from the riders? "I don't think so," Van Aert concluded his analysis sternly. "The road at that roundabout should always be closed. Fences, no confusion... This should simply not be possible."