Van Aert keeps the flame alive as Van der Poel closes in on history

The forecast is for another Mathieu van der Poel kind of weekend on the cyclocross circuit, with the world champion set to race – and, let’s face it, win – the World Cup races in Maasmechelen and Hoogerheide.

Yet despite Van der Poel’s clear pre-eminence in recent winters (and in recent springs), his name remains inevitably tethered to Wout van Aert’s in this corner of the world, a point forcefully illustrated on Friday by the organising committee of next week’s World Championships in Hulst.

Van der Poel may be chasing a record-breaking eighth elite world title at home in the Netherlands, but co-organiser Bram De Brauwer has confessed that the absence of his eternal rival Wout van Aert is going to have a significant impact on the box office. Hopes of a sell-out crowd of 55,000 essentially ended when the Belgian fractured his ankle in the Zilvermeercross on January 2.

“We can’t deny that his non-participation is a blow,” De Brauwer told Wielerflits. “We sold 35,000 tickets for Sunday afternoon in advance. We won’t reach 50,000 or 55,000, but that wasn’t a goal in itself.”

As with the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers, the contest between Van der Poel and Van Aert is still the biggest show in town in cyclocross, even when one of the parties is absent or at a low ebb. The memories of clashes past and the prospect of duels still to come keeps the rivalry alive even at a lopsided time like this.

With that in mind, the Belgian press has been projecting towards the road season and the possibility that Van Aert can still conjure up the level of performance required to compete with Van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar at the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.

On Friday afternoon, the cycling homepage of the Het Laatste Nieuws website featured no fewer than five stories about Van Aert, even though he won’t race until the end of February and he hasn’t given an interview since Visma | Lease a Bike’s media day ten days ago.

That editorial decision hasn’t been made on a whim. These days, analytics tell publications exactly what their audience wants to read about, and in Flanders, there is an insatiable appetite for all things Van Aert. 

That hasn’t diminished in the slightest over the past few ayears, even as Van der Poel has raced out of sight in their Monuments head-to-head, which currently stands at 8-1 in the Dutchman’s favour. If anything, Van Aert’s repeated ill fortune has only served to increase his popularity in his home country. “All the times I’ve been on the front page does surprise me,” Van Aert said at the Visma | Lease a Bike media day early last week.

In the early 2020s, Van Aert was firmly among the ‘aliens’ of the sport, rubbing shoulders with Pogačar and Van der Poel at the business end of the Classics and even in the high mountains of the Tour de France. 

Now, following a sequence of crashes and comebacks over the past few seasons, Van Aert has fallen from Olympus to become the most human of the peloton’s upper tier. Not altogether unlike Thibaut Pinot in France, that vulnerability has simply heightened his appeal. 

And so while Van der Poel cruises inexorably towards completing cyclocross, Het Laatste Nieuws’ focus is, justifiably, given the public interest, firmly on Van Aert’s rehabilitation from his fractured ankle. “His injury doesn’t seem to bother him: Wout van Aert shares reassuring training images from Spain,” read a hopeful headline on Friday afternoon, detailing the latest photo dump that the rider has uploaded to his Instagram account and parsing the pictures for clues as to his fitness.

The analysis isn’t only vibes-based, of course. Van Aert maintains his Strava profile more publicly than most. Last week, there was a flutter of excitement when he completed a 184km ride with his Visma | Lease a Bike teammates in the hinterland of Benidorm. “He’s clocking up the necessary kilometres: Wout van Aert is working with teammates on a six-hour training session in Spain,” trilled the approving headline.

The only surprise is that there wasn’t a similar update when Van Aert logged 4,000m of climbing on Thursday in the company of Matteo Jorgenson and Louis Barré, but it certainly won’t have gone unnoticed by his 78,000 followers on Strava or the 1.3 million who keep track of him on Instagram. There hasn’t been a Belgian Tour of Flanders winner since Philippe Gilbert in 2017, the longest such drought in the race’s history. Despite it all, a nation still turns its lonely eyes to Wout.  

Van der Poel is set to make history next weekend in Hulst, but Van Aert’s race to be fit in time for Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on February 28, and, above all, his dream of finally winning the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix remains among the most compelling narratives in the sport.

And in many ways, it scarcely matters if there will be a Van Aert-Van der Poel duel or not on the cobbles this Spring. The anticipation that there might be is enough for now. Just ask the organisers of the Hulst Worlds.