Winning time – Wout van Aert's Monuments mission the priority despite Giro debut

As the countdown to the 2024 season gathers pace, Cyclingnews looks at some of the key storylines that will define the coming year in cycling.

Wout van Aert can do just about everything, but that doesn’t mean he can have it all. On the eve of the 2024 season, the Belgian has been faced with tough choices.

Even in an era bedecked with the versatile gifts of men like Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), nobody has quite the same level of dexterity as Van Aert, who glides with such striking ease between registers, on and off road. The familiar, graceful pedal stroke is a constant across the calendar, in cyclocross and in bunch sprints, amid the cobbles and hills of the Classics and on mountain passes of the Tour.

And yet, as he approaches his 30th birthday, it’s still hard to shake off the sense that Van Aert’s hefty palmarès somehow does not quite add up to the sum of his variegated talents. He has already amassed more victories of real quality than most riders manage in a lifetime – among them nine Tour de France stages, Milan-San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem, Strade Bianche, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and two wins at E3 Harelbeke, not to mention three Cyclocross World Championships titles – but at times his career still feels defined by the races he hasn’t yet won.

That is partly because of the unrelenting and often unrealistic expectation of the cycling fan, but largely due to the achievements of Pogačar and his eternal rival Van der Poel over the past three years. The Monument may be a relatively modern construct, but in the 21st century, it has become the gold standard for measuring the achievements of one-day riders, and Van Aert’s account is light.

Pogačar has now won five Monuments, while Van der Poel reached a running tally of four thanks to his victories at Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix last Spring. For good measure, the Dutchman added the Road World Championships title at Van Aert’s expense in Glasgow, and he finished the year as the inaugural winner of the Vélo d’Or for one-day riders.

Van Aert, by contrast, still has ‘only’ one Monument to his name. As the years have passed since his 2020 Milan-San Remo victory, that statistic has begun to look more like an accusation than an achievement.

The Belgian was, by a distance, the peloton’s outstanding rider when pro cycling reopened for business after the first COVID-19 lockdown, and his victory against Julian Alaphilippe at that August edition of Milan-San Remo looked set to be the first of many over the Monument distance.

In the intervening period, however, Van Aert has endured repeated frustration in the biggest one-day races, notching up six podium finishes in his ten Monument appearances since, as well as silver medals at the Olympics and Worlds. His versatility was underlined by third place at last year’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but his real Classics ambitions are focused squarely on the first two Sundays in April, and the two races best tailored to his gifts.

At the Tour of Flanders, Van Aert was pipped by Van der Poel in 2020, denied a start by COVID-19 in 2022 and beaten into fourth by his two great rivals last April. At this year’s Paris-Roubaix, meanwhile, Van Aert suffered a cruel late puncture that denied him a joust to the line with Van der Poel, having placed second behind a surprising Dylan van Baarle twelve months previously.

Van Aert’s decision to ride the Giro d’Italia instead of the Tour de France in 2024 was the main focus when the Belgian met the press at the Visma-Lease A Bike presentation on Thursday, but speculation about his true ambitions at the corsa rosa distracts from the obvious: his primary goals in 2024 are the same as they ever were. One-day events are what drive Van Aert, including the Olympics and the World Championships, but, above all, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.

“My main dream remains the same, to win one of the Flemish Classics,” Van Aert had already told Eurosport last month during a visit to Colombia last month for Rigoberto Urán’s sportive. “It’s something I will be trying to achieve until I do it.”

The changes

Van Aert was always likely to make some tweaks to his approach in 2024, but the change became more radical by necessity when his long-term coach Marc Lamberts opted to follow Primoz Roglic to Bora-Hansgrohe at the end of last season. Van Aert has since begun working with Mathieu Heijboer, and he noted that the Dutchman has placed “a different emphasis” on his preparation.

The first striking difference is a notably pared-down cyclocross calendar that will see Van Aert forgo the World Championships and switch his focus fully to the road much sooner than in years past. “We found that we were putting too much energy into cyclocross without realising it,” he explained on Thursday. “It was a difficult decision, but it gives me some peace of mind.”

Since his first Classics campaign with Crelan in 2018, Van Aert had typically begun his road campaign at Opening Weekend, but in 2023, he delayed his seasonal debut until Tirreno-Adriatico. The experiment backfired. E3 Harelbeke victory notwithstanding, it was hard to shake the sense that Van Aert was still chasing form right into April. “I was never at my best last year,” he conceded.

It’s hardly a surprise, then, that 2024 will see Van Aert make his earliest ever start to a road season, pinning on a number at the Clásica Jaén on February 12 before riding the Volta ao Algarve and both Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne. Intriguingly, Van Aert will then spend almost a month away from racing – skipping Strade Bianche, Tirreno-Adriatico and Milan-San Remo – before returning to action at E3 Harelbeke. He is also slated to ride Dwars door Vlaanderen as a warm-up for the Tour of Flanders.

In 2023, Van Aert sat out Jumbo-Visma’s domination of Opening Weekend and was then expected to hit the ground running in March. This time out, the February slate of racing offers a gentler start, and, perhaps as importantly, will see him race alongside the rest of Jumbo-Lease A Bike’s cobbled Classics unit from the outset rather than parachute into the line-up at Harelbeke.

Everything, it seems, is built around the first two Sundays in April, where Van Aert will look to tip the balance of his never-ending contest with Van der Poel back in his favour after a couple of years where the Dutchman has enjoyed a clear edge, both in the field and on the road. Pogacar’s absence only heightens the prospect of a WVA-VDP joust at the Ronde.

Van der Poel’s success of the past two years has owed much to picking and choosing his targets sagely, and, it must be said, by racing more cannily than he had in his youth. Less can sometimes be more, and Van Aert looks to have absorbed the lesson by simplifying his Spring campaign.

That said, Van Aert’s Giro debut is an intriguing prospect, particularly on a route with two long time trials. Given his performances in the mountains of the Tour, it’s not outlandish for Van Aert to target a high overall finish in Italy, but he appears – rightly – reluctant to sacrifice his competitiveness on the cobbles in order to do so. The corsa rosa, it seems, will only begin to occupy Van Aert’s thoughts in earnest in April. Striking cameos on all terrains are surely a more likely prospect than a GC challenge, particularly now that Cian Uijtdebroeks will be on hand after completing his controversial transfer from Bora-Hansgrohe.

Riding the Giro in favour of the Tour also allows Van Aert to tailor his own build-up to the Olympic Games, though it’s unclear if how beneficial that will be. While it offers Van Aert space to work on his time trialling, history suggests it might prove a hindrance in the road race. Since the Olympics opened to professionals in 1996, after all, every men’s road race gold medallist has ridden the Tour beforehand. (In 2000, Jan Ullrich also raced the Vuelta before winning in Sydney).

On the other hand, Van Aert’s likely Vuelta a España debut in August seems destined to serve as a rather public training camp for the Zürich World Championships. He will surely recall how the pandemic-delayed Tour of 2020 saw him at his sharpest for that year’s Imola Worlds, even if he had to settle for frustrating silver medals in each event.

In other words, while Van Aert’s new adventures in Grand Tours draw the eye, the prizes he covets are the same as ever – the biggest one-day races. His 2024 programme is simply a new road towards the same destination.