Wout van Aert reveals decisive factor in Montmartre win
Speaking on the Inside the Beehive podcast of Team Visma | Lease a Bike, Wout van Aert sounded lighter than he did a year ago. The winter is different, the pressure is different, and the memories of 2025 still sit close to the surface. And on the topic of the final stage of the Tour de France, he pointed to a choice made before the flag dropped, a small gamble on wide tyres and really low pressure that helped him feel in control when the roads turned slick.
After months away, Van Aert described the simple comfort of re-entering the team bubble and seeing familiar faces again as he begins his preparations for 2026. Last winter, he said, the baseline was survival. “End of November was the time where I was still balancing rehab and starting a proper training,” Van Aert said. “It’s like a constant pressure on you. You feel like fighting against the time.”
After his crash-blighted 2024, Van Aert confessed he pushed too hard to return quickly and he missed the reset that most riders count on. This year, he has approached it differently. “Mentally it’s been a way better winter where I had really time to relax and to enjoy life a little bit,” he said.
The road season that followed in 2025 was not instantly rewarding, and Van Aert struggled in the Classics. “The first couple of races were not really satisfying,” he said. “One week before the big goal and I still didn’t find the feeling I was looking for.”
The shift in Van Aert's season, and the emotional centre of the conversation in the podcast, came at the Giro, where he entered with compromised preparation and uneven sensations, then found a moment that rewired the narrative when he won the gravel stage to Siena.
“I never thought I would have a chance to win that stage, especially not from the GC group,” he said. “I was completely dead, but I still believed I could have a chance. My experience and my winner’s mentality came in in the final few kilometers.”
And when he talked about the finish, the language turned almost cinematic, as if he still cannot quite explain why it felt inevitable. “Bit exaggerated probably, but it felt like it was just meant to be,” he said. “I still have goosebumps if I think about it.”
By the time the Tour de France came around, however, Van Aert was still not at his best, and he was frank about how that feels inside a super team with big ambitions. “I felt a bit useless. Didn’t have the legs for myself but also not to help the team,” he said.
Yet he kept hunting moments, and on the final evening in Paris, he rode with the kind of clarity that only comes when you accept risk without dramatising it.
“I took quite some risks, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like everything was in control,” he said. “I gambled: wide tyres, really low pressure. I had the perfect setup for the finale. It doesn’t happen too often arriving alone on the Champs Élysées.”
For 2026, Van Aert simply wants clean momentum. “Just a smooth run into my main objectives,” he said.
In a sport built on suffering, that might be the most ambitious wish of all.
