"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
Cycling
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."
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¡QUÉ FINAL! 𝐐𝐔𝐄́ 𝐇𝐀 𝐏𝐀𝐒𝐀𝐃𝐎 𝐀𝐐𝐔𝐈́ 😨
— Eurosport.es (@Eurosport_ES) February 19, 2025
🇮🇹 Filippo Ganna (@INEOSGrenadiers) se lleva la primera etapa de la Vuelta al Algarve en un final totalmente surrealista con muchos corredores que se equivocaron de camino#AAlgarvia #VoltaAoAlgarve pic.twitter.com/kSeGsYW4RN
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- My sympathy goes to Olav. There is no need to be so hard on someone who suffers and he is not a bad person.
KerisVroom01-04-2025 - Nice though you have to ask why they call it a wildcard as it’s always pretty obvious who will receive them.Mistermaumau01-04-2025
- Absolutely, we are inundated by articles (not only in cycling or sport but everywhere from stocks to weather to elections) from self-called or popularly regarded experts making calls without reasoning. They basically know little more than any other informed or interested party and base everything on odds. The fact that they never have to justify their wrong calls post event but continue to get to make calls should get some attention. It would be cool if someone tallied up and recorded their predictions for future reference.Mistermaumau01-04-2025
- Yes, I agree but you’re taking risks writing such long posts here ;-) In that sense, the Tourless Primoz discussion is also pretty pointless as he virtually won a Tour (nobody would have counted on Tadej doing what he did at the last moment at that time and I guess it was bad karma for Primoz for so ofren cutting things so fine). I think you over interpreted my original thesis, it was not for trying to explain his current state, it was to suggest there was already mental material pre-crashes that has helped worsen his state, when it rains it pours. I really do remember having the feeling in that past he was more focused on not letting MVDP get better than him than doing his own thing. The seed of doubt was already planted and it doesn’t take much for doubt to grow in all sorts of directions.Mistermaumau01-04-2025
- i wouldn't count Pogi out. Low probability of a win, but not impossiblemobk01-04-2025
- Right now it doesn't seem that his legs are there or that his head is in the racevappaxbipmv01-04-2025
- would have been nice to hear exactly WHY he thinks pog has zero chance in some greater detail. i mean, tend to agree that his chances aren’t GREAT, but some explanation from the expert with an opinion would be nice. MINE is that, in spite of the recon he did where tadej concluded that the course “wasn’t that hard” i think that doing the full route at full gas is really going to beat up pogacar’s 145lb body, to a degree that he maybe isn’t expecting. but hey, we’ll see in a couple weeks. like everyone else, i do think it’s supercool that he’s going.OCexile01-04-2025
- Go back to that era and look at the lousy mechanicals he's had at Paris-Roubaix. Take those away, maybe he has another Monument, Van der Poel has one less, and suddenly all the rules change. Those mechanicals preceded his awful crashes - and you're right, that Tour was amazing. Ventoux, TT, and Champs-Elysees?! Something that Pogacar and Van der Poel can't do, just Wout. It still amazes me.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Oh, the impossibility of this kind of comparison. A pre-WW2 Binda had amazing statistics, and that was one era. During what I think of as the romantic era, Poulidor had an incredible run at the Tour without winning, and Bobet won some grand tours and some Monuments. In this modern era (for me: after Hinault), we've had multiple Monument winners win a grand tour (such as Valverde and Kelly, with Kelly the better rider in general), and then we've got someone like Roglic, the true GC rider. Sure there was a Monument that was kind of a fluke (both Pogacar and Hirschi might have won, and twitchy Alaphilippe deserved relegation), but what matters are the 5 grand tours and all these wins across the 1 week GC races except for the Tour de Suisse (you'd think he'd race it to get the set of them all). In this era, since 2000 or so, maybe he meets the description as best non-Tour winner. How many GC riders have these wins and not the Tour? To compare to other eras really is not possible. He's his own unique rider, and it's been amazing watching him for the past many years. That's about all we can say.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Ease up on a brother!bobo01-04-2025