With eight races to go in the competition, the Pauwels Sauzen-Bingoal rider has 105 points, well ahead of second-place Toon Aerts (Deschacht-Hens-FSP), who has 78. Laurens Sweeck (Crelan-Corendon) sits in third, at 67 points. Vanthourenhout is obviously in grand form, but some of his recent success, especially in the last two World Cup races, in Dublin and Namur, was also due to the misfortune of his rivals.
In Dublin, Vanthourenhout’s teammate Eli Iserbyt, who is the defending World Cup champion, took a curve too fast and crashed late in the race as he was leading and looked the likely winner. That crash inspired Vanthourenhout to up the pace and ride into the lead, which he never relinquished.
In last weekend’s dramatic World Cup race in Namur, Aerts had what looked like a winning lead over Vanthourenhout with only a few hundred meters left to race when he crashed on a steep, slippery descent and again Vanthourenhout took advantage and rode away for the victory.
“If you are in good condition, then luck is [on] your side,” Vanthourenhout said after the Namur race. “I thought the race was over. But I know that if you are totally unlucky in the off-camber section it is really difficult, so it was in my mind to have a good line. I saw in front that Toon has a crash and so I just [went] full gas until the finish.”
Until the Dublin race, it seemed that Vanthourenhout was riding in support of Iserbyt, who was favored to repeat his 2023 overall World Cup championship this year. But Iserbyt has had a rough year, which was made worse in Namur, where he suffered from a spell of sciatica and had to abandon the race. Sciatica is a chronic inflammation of the sciatic nerve, which runs from the spine all the way down to the toes, and can be very painful. It remains to be seen how many races, if any, the ailment will cause Iserbyt to miss.
In the meantime, Vanthourenhout is finally getting the results that have been expected of him since he won the Overall Under-23 Superprestige competition, the Overall Under-23 World Cup and the Under-23 World Championship in 2014-15. However, his results in the Elite Men’s category have been disappointing since then, with wins few and far between.
He didn’t win his first Elite Men’s World Cup race until January 2021 in Tábor and had won only three other World Cup races since then until this year’s double. In other words, he has been improving from year to year and this year seems finally to have hit his stride. Perhaps his marriage, in August 2021, to Belgian road racer Kelly Van den Steen (Chevalmeire) has been inspirational.
Pauwels Sauzen-Bingoal manager Jurgen Mettepenningen told Wielerflits that a change in lifestyle as well as in self-confidence was indeed responsible for his recent success. “Michael didn’t win that much before. That also has to do with a lack of belief in himself,” he explained. “That only comes from winning, then you get that belief and confidence that you can do it. Michael is mentally very strong in his head. You need that at this level.”
Mettepenningen went on to say, “Three or four years ago he was sometimes a playboy. Also in training. Now he lives for his job, he does everything for it and trains very hard. Michael is only concerned with one thing and that is cyclocross. That playfulness has completely disappeared.”
However, Vanthourenhout did not look like a winner at the start of the season. “It was more difficult at the beginning of the season, due to circumstances and bad luck,” he said. “That first big victory took a long time to come. But now he is finally in top condition, with good morale on top of that. Then he is capable of a lot. The courses that are more difficult are also to the advantage of the slightly older riders with a bigger engine.”
He went on to praise his rider’s current form, which enables him to ride near the front for an entire race. “Michael is in top condition,” Mettepenningen said. “He doesn’t just win, he also makes the race. From start to finish he’s pulling at the front. He always keeps on pounding, which gave us a nice duel [at Namur] and the audience became the big winner. It was a fantastic ‘cross on the cutting edge. In the end the ball is rolling well for us now and that’s just great.”
It will be interesting to see how long Vanthourenhout can keep up this run of form and fortune and how he will react to the appearance in the races of defending world champion Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert.
“We are really not thinking about that yet,” Mettepenningen said. “We have already achieved that five out of five [for] ourselves. That’s not nothing.”
