{"id":198336,"date":"2025-04-04T07:32:40","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T07:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/?p=198336"},"modified":"2025-04-04T07:32:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T07:32:40","slug":"powless-hangs-painful-defeat-on-van-aert-and-visma-lease-a-bike-in-dwars-door-vlaanderen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/2025\/04\/04\/powless-hangs-painful-defeat-on-van-aert-and-visma-lease-a-bike-in-dwars-door-vlaanderen\/","title":{"rendered":"Powless Hangs Painful Defeat on van Aert and Visma\u2013Lease a Bike in Dwars door Vlaanderen"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you win and lose a one-day race at the same time? Put another way, how do you lose a race with the perfect winning strategy? Well, just ask Visma\u2013Lease a Bike because that\u2019s just what they \u2018accomplished\u2019 in Wednesday\u2019s Dwars door Vlaanderen when Neilson Powless (EF Education\u2013EasyPost) beat Wout van Aert in a sprint to the finish line.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A brilliant Visma breakaway <\/strong><\/h2>\n

The race in which van Aert crashed last year and ruined the first half of his season was supposed to become his renaissance in 2025 ahead of his announced targets, Sunday\u2019s Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix one week later. And his team really did have a wonderful strategy.<\/p>\n

With 72 km left to ride in the 184.2 km race from Roeselare to Waregem, four Visma riders\u2014Edoardo Affini, Tiesj Benoot, last year\u2019s winner Matteo Jorgenson and van Aert\u2014burst away from the peloton and soon had a 10-second lead. Affini quickly dropped away, but the other three Visma riders eventually joined up with riders that had been ahead of them\u2014Rasmus S\u00f8jberg Pedersen (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), Mikkel Bjerg (UAE Team Emirates\u2013XRG), Fabio Van den Bossche (Alpecin-Deceuninck) and Powless\u2014forming a strong breakaway group.<\/p>\n

However, their lead over the peloton, in which the winner of last weekend\u2019s Gent-Wevelgem, Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) was the most active and insistent pursuer, hovered between 12 and 22 seconds. Three riders gradually dropped away from the lead group, leaving Powless surrounded by the yellow of three Visma\u2013Lease a Bike riders. The four worked well together, and with about 45 km to go, the pursuers began to lose hope, motivation and\/or energy, as the gap increased to 33 seconds.<\/p>\n

A bad decision<\/strong><\/h2>\n

With 40 km left to race, they had a lead of 42 seconds, which ballooned to 54 seconds with 19 km left. It was clear by then that the winner would come from the leading group of four, and Visma had three chances out of four to pick up the big prize. All they had to do was come up with the best way to beat Powless. They chose to let van Aert take him on in a sprint. It was the wrong choice, as a heartbroken van Aert himself admitted after the race.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m fully responsible for this loss,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was me that made the call to go for a sprint, and I asked Matteo [Jorgenson] and Tiesj [Benoot] to just control in the final and bring me to the line. I was confident that I could win, but in the sprint, I cramped completely and Neilson Powless turned out to be stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n

In retrospect, the better strategy would have been to let Jorgenson or Benoot attack with about 2 km left to race, in the expectation that Powless would follow and tire himself out, leaving the door open for van Aert to pick up the spoils. But he clearly overestimated himself and underestimated the American.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by Dwars door Vlaanderen (@dwarsdoorvlaanderenofficial)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n