Wout van Aert is coming to the boil again, and just in time for the Worlds

When Van Aert beat Tadej Pogačar to win in Paris on last year’s Tour de France and again on the Roubaix velodrome in April, his performances owed more to perspiration than to inspiration.

On the 2025 Tour, Van Aert had laboured for three weeks before somehow summoning a moment of his old strength on Montmartre, but it proved to be a fleeting glimpse of past glories rather than a hard reboot.

By Paris-Roubaix this past April, Van Aert was inching closer to his old level, despite breaking his ankle at the turn of the year, but he was still very much the underdog in another two-up contest with Pogačar, the rugged Rocky to the Slovenian’s smoother Apollo Creed. Somehow, he absorbed the blows all the way to the velodrome before delivering a haymaker of his own.

It was the emotional highpoint of Van Aert’s career and a reminder of why we watch sport in the first place, but it still felt like a one-off occasion rather than the catalyst for a full-blown renaissance. That sense was reinforced when Van Aert was ruled out of this year’s Tour by injury.

Van Aert, however, clearly made use of his July away from the spotlight. A hat-trick of stage wins and the overall title at the Tour of Denmark suggested as much, and the confirmation has come on this Vuelta.

In the opening week of the race, when Van Aert found himself deployed as a foil and lead-out man for his teammate Matthew Brennan, we wondered if he would get any real chances of his own at the Vuelta. With Pogačar on the march, it also looked as though Visma’s focus on Brennan in the sprints might cost Van Aert his tilt at the green jersey, even if Visma | Lease a Bike sports director Maarten Wynants insisted otherwise. “There will be opportunities, for sure,” he told us in Roquetes, and he was as good as his word.

The first real chance arrived at Valdelinares on stage 7, when Van Aert assumed he didn’t have the legs to beat his breakaway companions on the final climb, so he worked to make sure they’d at least stay clear and guarantee himself a haul of points towards his green jersey. After placing third that afternoon, Van Aert realised he had undersold himself: he was climbing far better than he had anticipated.

He still needed a win to be sure, of course, and that finally arrived on stage 13 to Loja, where Brennan showed that he is far more than ‘just’ a sprinter by playing a man-of-the-match role in snuffing out a succession of late attacks before Van Aert clipped away in the finale. The two-up sprint against Valentin Paret-Peintre was a formality.

With his confidence restored, Van Aert is a different rider, and he demonstrated as much on Sunday’s heat-shortened run to Córdoba. Visma spent much of the day controlling the peloton on behalf of Brennan, even if the rugged terrain meant this stage could still go in multiple direction. Ultimately, it went in the direction dictated by Van Aert, who sparked the winning move with a touch of invention at the intermediate sprint with 32km to go.

Much like when the Vuelta came this way in 2024, Van Aert never really looked beatable in Córdoba on Sunday. Back then, he easily outstripped all-comers in a bunch sprint. This time out, he was the puppet master for the last twenty miles before overwhelming his breakaway companions in a five-up sprint.

Already a stage winner and already safely ensconced in the green jersey, Van Aert was the obvious favourite as soon as he forced the winning move at the intermediate sprint, but he has squandered more obvious winning hands in recent years, most notably at last year’s Dwars door Vlaanderen.

But there wasn’t the merest hint of jitters or overthinking on the run-in to Córdoba. Instead, Van Aert produced a masterclass in the art of managing a breakaway as both the strongest and fastest man in the move. 

That advantage often comes with the disadvantage of being forced to do more work than the rest, but Van Aert dosed his effort perfectly. Sean Kelly may know more than anyone in cycling history about how to negotiate that precise scenario. In the Eurosport commentary box, he had only praise for Van Aert’s game-management, noting how the Belgian reacted instantly to each of Andreas Leknessund’s attacks in the finale. No games, no second-guessing, no contest.

“I took second behind a monster,” was Alessandro Romele’s admiring take on his efforts against Van Aert, who is pedalling with the kind of ease we saw on that 2024 Vuelta, when more or less everything he tried seemed to come off. 

He’s no longer quite the all-terrain threat he was on the Tours de France of 2020, 2021 and 2022, of course, but this version of Van Aert remains one of the most compelling sights in pro cycling.

Van Aert reaches the Vuelta’s second rest day with a winning advantage in the green jersey standings, some 108 points clear of his teammate Brennan, and there are further opportunities for him to strike in the race’s final week.

But above all, Van Aert will surely be warming to the idea of a serious tilt at the World Championships in Montreal in three weeks’ time. He will certainly feel he has a score to settle with a race where he has twice claimed silver (in Imola in 2020 and Glasgow in 2023) and always lined up among the very top favourites, most notably on home roads in Leuven in 2021, when he had to settle for a disappointing 11th. 

With Pogačar ruled out of his title defence by injury, the Montreal Worlds is suddenly more open than it appeared, and Van Aert’s form is coming to the boil at precisely the right time, even if the opposition will be tougher than in Spain.

Van Aert will have Remco Evenepoel for company in the Belgian team – an advantage that might prove a disadvantage – and he will face stiff competition from old rivals like Mathieu van der Poel and Tom Pidcock. But on the evidence of the Vuelta, Van Aert will set out for Canada with ample reason to believe. He’s started to make it look easy again.