The Belgian single-day race across Flanders became a fiasco for cycling superstar Wout van Aert. The Belgian then accepted the guilt.
The day was a disgrace for the dumped bike star Wout van Aert and his Visma team. The team went to three in the target sprint – followed by Neilson Powless.
However, the nine-time Tour-de-France-Tappepapp winner Van Aert, who had seriously injured himself in the race a year earlier, was beaten in the Powless sprint and finished second. After 184.2 kilometers between Roeselare and Waregem, van Aert’s teammate Tiesj Benoot from Belgium was third.
After the race, Van Aert expressed extremely self -critical. “If you are three in a group of four and the race does not win, you have always made a mistake,” he quarreled.
The 30 -year -old added: “I am completely responsible for this defeat. I decided that we would put on the sprint and asked Matteo and Tiesj to only control in the final and get myself to the home stretch – because I was quite confident that I could win the sprint. But in the sprint I got massive cramps and Neilson Powless has proven to be faster.”
Van Aert was “too selfish”. “I wanted this victory so much, especially after the criticism that I had to endure and the whole bad luck that I had last year,” noted the cycling superstar and admitted: “In exceptional cases, I thought of myself, I did not want one of my teammates to win this race. This is actually not so. So I’m extremely disappointed.”
Destroyed self -confidence by Wout van Aert?
The Danish “TV2” cycling expert Emil Axelgaard explained Van Aert’s misstep with a lack of self-confidence.
“Van Aert’s decision shows that it is a man in the crisis,” he analyzed: “If Wout Van Aert has jeopardized the victory of the team to get his own, it says everything about how much his self -confidence is affected. It was undoubtedly the self -confidence when he was pursuing the controversial decision.”