Matteo Jorgenson attack seals Dwars door Vlaanderen victory for Visma-Lease a Bike after Wout van Aert crash
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Updated 27/03/2024 at 16:26 GMT
It had looked like it might not be Visma-Lease a Bike's day when star man Wout van Aert crashed out of the Dwars door Vlaanderen in a nasty crash but team-mates Tiesj Benoot and Matteo Jorgenson kept their cool at the front of the race and in the end, it was the American who timed his attack to absolute perfection to take the win in style for his team.
‘Big result for a big guy!’ - Jorgenson breezes to victory at Dwars door Vlaanderen
A superb attack from a break by America's Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike) saw him seal victory at the 2024 Dwars door Vlaanderen after a nasty crash earlier in the day had taken out team-mate Wout van Aert.
The final chasing pack came down to Tiesj Benoot and Jorgenson (both Visma), Stefan Kung (Groupama-FDJ), Josh Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers), Dries De Bondt (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale) and Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility)
That group had included Alberto Bettiol (EF-Education) and indeed at various points it had seemed that he might be the winner but he cramped up after an attack and dropped away.
Entering the final 10km, the threat clearly came from the two Visma riders and the others had to try and work together to keep them in check.
Unsurprisingly, it was Benoot who pushed away first with Tarling holding onto him but the rest of the pack did their best to keep up with them, continuing the games of cat and mouse that had plagued the break for most of the race.
A couple of kilometres on, it was Kung who pushed the pace up and Tarling was the one who was caught up but incredibly a minute or two later while the others were playing, he caught back up.
However just as he rejoined the group, Jorgenson decided that was the moment - he went and the others didn’t seem able to close the gap, at least initially.
Entering the closing stages, the chasing group of five seemed spent and didn’t have anything left in the tank, particularly De Bondt and Abrahamsen who had been in the leading pack for so much of the day.
In the end, Abrahamsen took second while Kung came home for third in the race that paves the way for the Tour of Flanders at the weekend.
“It’s unbelievable, it really is," Jorgenson said afterwards. "This whole season has been a dream so far, surreal actually.
“Yeah, very important [to have two riders in the break], as a team our whole strategy is based around having numbers in the final so there was a moment in one of the last cobbles section when Stefan Kung was going in the gutter and Tiesj was a little bit gapped but thankfully I waited for him because without him I wouldn’t have won this race.
“I was on Wout’s wheel at the time actually. It was obviously a decisive moment in the race, it was just a racing incident, we had two lead-out trains tracking us and we came together and it was a really ugly fall.
“I saw the whole thing and I knew that Wout was going to be out of the race at that point because we were going so fast. Tiesj and I continued with the plan because there’s still a bike race but my thoughts are with Wout and the rest of the guys involved.
“After Paris-Nice I refocused a bit because I didn’t have an auto-qualifying spot for the Olympics and that’s a big goal for me to make it to the Olympics so now I have that in the pocket and its been an insane season, I really can’t believe it."
Earlier in the day, at 67km, a huge crash in the peloton wiped out a number of big names including Van Aert, Biniam Girmay (Intermarche-Wanty) and Jasper Stuyven (Lidl-Trek).
As riders prepared to enter the final 50km, the race had been blown wide open by the crash, with a break, two separate chasing groups and the peloton.
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