Tim Wellens on van Baarle: "It was really not possible to get back to him"

Tim Wellens frequently has good form coming into the season, and after showing it at the Vuelta a Andalucia, today Tim Wellens put on an aggressive performance at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad as he tried to take a victory.

“My legs were good. And Van Baarle was clearly the strongest. It was really not possible to get back to him. Of course, if we had known he was going to win, we never would have let him pull away. But that is of course easy to say," Wellens said in a post-race interview.

The Belgian came to the Opening Weekend as the leader of UAE Team Emirates and today he put on a series of moves early on. However he was not present in the one attack that proved deadly, that of Dylan van Baarle inside the final 40 kilometers.

Wellens did have some of the best legs in the race, and attacked again in the Murr de Geraardsbergen, taking with him Matej Mohoric, Arnaud De Lie and Christophe Laporte. Outnumbered by Jumbo-Visma however there was little that could be done, but van Baarle still kept the gap despite having the chase of three riders.

“It is a pity that the third group came back in the final meters. Still, I think we rode a good race," he continued, as the quartet was caught by the peloton in sight of the line. De Lie and Laporte still completed the podium, but Wellens finished dead last, in 26th. 

“The finish was just two hundred meters too far for me. The last four kilometers it was clear that we would not come back, so then I just rode for a top five. It's a bit of a shame that they come back, but I think I can be happy with my race," Wellens concluded.