Blazin' Saddles: The gloves come off as Poels ends Team Sky's wait

After thirty-three attempts Team Sky finally struck gold. In Dutchman Wout Poels, the wait was ended by the most unlikely of sources – but a win's a win, and Team Sky finally have that Monument they so covet.

And to think that some people never thought they'd see the day – certainly not until (and quite rightly) Peter Sagan had ended his own long wait for glory.

On being founded in 2009, Team Sky's aim was to deliver a British Grand Tour winner within five years. They managed that – twice – through Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome – before Sir David Brailsford underlined a new five-year plan and "2020 vision" that included consistency in the Grand Tours (delivered again, thanks to Froome) "as well as classics and Monuments".

While Sky have managed to win many minor classics such as E3 Harelbeke, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, they always seemed to struggle lighting up the cigar on the centre stage.

Twice Ben Swift has gone close in Milan-San Remo; Wiggins and Geraint Thomas were in the mix in the 2014 Paris-Roubaix; Ian Stannard had a one-in-five chance of reaching heaven in the Hell of the North a fortnight ago.

Michal Kwiatkowski – bought in to add firepower in the Ardennes – was the logical solution to end this barren run in La Doyenne. The former world champion arrived at Sky with another Pole from Etixx-QuickStep in Michal Golas. But in the end it was Poels and not these two Poles who brought home the bacon for Brailsford on Sunday.

Unlike the previous two races of Ardennes Week the decisive move of Liège-Bastogne-Liège came not on the final climb (of the Cauberg or Mur de Huy) but on the penultimate ascent – in this case a new short but sharp cobbled affair on the Rue Naniot, inside the final 3km of a race shortened to 248km because of the foul weather.

Switzerland's Michael Albasini (Orica-GreenEdge) made the telling acceleration and Poels was the last of a trio of riders who were able to bridge across. With another former world champion, Rui Costa of Lampre-Merida, and the experienced Samuel Sanchez (BMC) involved, it soon became clear that we were witnessing the winning hand.

Talking of hands, Poels was clearly thinking of his at the end of the sweeping downhill run to the start of the final rise to the finish line in Ans. With the streamlined pack not far behind, Poels tore off his sodden gloves and cast them on the road asunder – displaying almost as much collective disgust as with which he had tossed that fan's pair of sunglasses off the edge of Monte Zoncolan two years ago in the Giro d'Italia.

If Poels made an attempt at throwing his gloves away from the battlefield then this was invisible to the naked eye. He might as well have thrown banana skins in his wake; this was the sartorial equivalent of throwing one's bidon into an on-coming peloton, or of a bleach-blonde photographer lying out in the Gent-Wevelgem road to take a photo.

A watching spectator managed to bag one of the gloves. Had she been any more carefree she may have caused havoc while skittering out to snare the second mitt. Thankfully, that didn't happen. And in any case, the remaining rogue glove did not have the same effect as the discarded biro that apparently caused Dan Martin to crash on the final bend of this same race two years ago.

Because, despite a spirited chase by youngsters Ilnur Zakarin (Katusha) and Warren Barguil (Giant-Alpecin) the race was already won. Not by Poels just yet – but by one of the leading four riders.

By discarding his gloves, though, Poels had quite literally thrown down the gauntlet. He later said he'd tossed them away for reasons of practicality: heavy, wet gloves sliding on the bars while changing gears are, after all, hardly conducive to winning a sprint.

The 28 year-old said he took his gloves off so that he could shift gears better in the event of a final sprint – something Albasini rued after the Swiss claimed his gearing was too small in the final dash to the line.

"I couldn't sprint with the same power and I should have changed my gears beforehand," Albasini told Cyclingnews. "That was my error – although I have to admit he [Poels] did a super sprint, too."

In fact, for all the talk of Poels' surprise win, the rangy Dutchman sprinted to fourth place four days earlier in the Flèche Wallonne and was clearly a man in form. Three years after a hideous crash in the Tour de France almost ended his career, Poels is finally hitting the heights expected of him when he first burst onto the scene as a promising youngster.

Poels has talked of leading Sky for a Grand Tour one day – and while he'll have to form an orderly queue alongside the likes of Mikel Landa, Thomas, Leopold Konig and Benat Intxausti, he certainly has the place in the line vacated by Riche Porte and, in all likelihood, Sergio Henao.

Poels' victory in Liège-Bastogne-Liège not only gave Team Sky their first ever Monument win but confirmed the British team as the most consistent of the major spring classics. Ben Swift and Ian Stannard's earlier results in Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix mean that Sky are the only team to podium in three of the four Monuments so far this season – and that's not counting Luke Rowe's superb fifth place in the Tour of Flanders.

Indeed, if the Monuments Club operated a one-in, one-out policy then clean-cut Sky have entered at the expense of a drunken and disorderly Etixx-QuickStep, who have failed to win a Monument for the second successive year.

It's all very well for slurring manager Patrick Lefevere – ejected by the doormen once again – to protest that his riders "are very thin and the conditions wore down their resistance" but it hardly hits the spot when the race was won by a rider far thinner than them all, one who incidentally almost lost a kidney the year before failing to make the grade at Etixx in 2014.

But credit where credit's due. For all Movistar's firm grip on the vast majority of the race – not to forget Carlos Betancur's cavalier approach to keeping warm (the Colombian eschewed leg warmers in favour of bare legs) – Sky went about their business with the requisite blend of professionalism and panache.

Salvatore Puccio, Sebastian Henao, Lars Petter Nordhaug, Golas and Swift all worked tirelessly in the sleet and snow, Kwiatkowski put in a scene-setting, Betancur-esque attack with 10km remaining, and even Chris Froome, who came of his bike half way through, not only put in a decent shift, but managed to complete the race (albeit more than 10 minutes down and, bizarrely, wearing one of his absent team-mate's jerseys).

In fact, for all the talk of the awful conditions, the completion rate of the 102nd edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège was pretty high: 154 out of 200 riders – not as high as Milan-San Remo (180) but considerably higher than the Tour of Flanders (118) and Paris-Roubaix (119), and both those races were played out in rather clement, sunny conditions.

While Wout Poels may not carry the same kind of lustre as the previous man to tame the Old Lady in the snow (Bernard Hinault, no less), the fourth Dutchman to win the oldest of the classics, very much like the Badger, does certainly know when the time's ripe to shed the gloves and roll up the sleeves for a good scrap.