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"There are certainly places enough to make a difference" - Wout van Aert does not count on sprint finish at Glasgow World Championships
CyclingSaturday, 05 August 2023 at 12:06
Belgium come in with three big favourites for the rainbow jersey in Glasgow, one of them Wout van Aert. Without a surprise he can contest for the win in a hilly and technical circuit, but he doesn't expect to put his sprint to much use.
“This World Championship is certainly a main goal. I rode differently in the Tour than last year, also due to private circumstances. But also because this World Championship was coming up," van Aert said in a press conference yesterday. "That's why I didn't go green. I'm not here to just come along for a ride. It will be a tough course. Very technical too. There are certainly places enough to make a difference. There is a lot of talk about that last hill, but there are several possibilities.”
The preparation looked ideal, at the Tour de France his form looked to build up enough throughout the two weeks and he impressed, as usual, on all terrains. Although he didn't take a win his form indicates that he can do so this Sunday, after he left the race early for the birth of his second child he took a bit of extra rest and training towards what is the biggest remaining goal of his season.
He will team up with an incredibly strong team, one which includes both Remco Evenepoel. Notably, former World Champion Tom Boonen criticized the choice of the Belgian coach, he would not have united Philipsen with van Aert. Van Aert responds to that: “Jasper is super strong, he has already proven that enough. We have different scenarios. Jasper has to follow and then sprint. To me, that's not exactly bad. We have to see the positive in it.”
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024