Arnaud De Lie lives up to billing with exhibition in GP de Québec finale

Arnaud De Lie’s victory at the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec was a long time in the making. As an eight-year-old, after all, he had stayed up long past his bedtime to watch his fellow Walloon Philippe Gilbert win the second edition of the race in 2011.

That memory was still with him when he sat down with Lotto-Dstny management to plan his season last winter. The team wasn’t guaranteed a ride following their relegation from the WorldTour, but De Lie indicated his desire to make the trek across the Atlantic in September and so a wildcard invitation was procured.

In the end, the Canadian expedition was more than justified. After clocking up sixteen wins across his first two professional seasons, De Lie has now claimed his maiden victory at WorldTour level by bounding up Québec’s Grande Allée and powering past Corbin Strong (Israel Premier Tech) and Michael Matthews (Jayco-Alula) within sight of the line.

“To win in Québec at 21 years of age, it’s incredible, because the level here is crazy,” De Lie smiled when he took a seat in the press room afterwards. The farmer’s son from Lescheret in the province of Luxembourg confessed that he felt something of obligation to provide value for money on his first trip outside of Europe.

“I came here with ambition, but the team had to invest for me to come here,” he said. “I was the one who said at the start of the year that I wanted to come to Canada, so raising my arms here is a way of saying thank you to the management for putting their confidence in me, because it’s an expensive journey to make.”

De Lie already had a firm idea of the lie of the land in Québec from more than a decade of watching attentively on television, and he was able to familiarise himself fully with the 12.6km urban circuit and the climbs of the Côte de la Montagne and the Côte des Glacis following his arrival in Canada on Tuesday.

“I wanted a mass sprint and it’s rare that it doesn’t happen here, but I did think of the 2011 edition when Philippe Gilbert won and it all kicked off a bit,” he said. “But the last editions have all been run off in a similar way, so I was able to keep fresh for the finale.”

For the finale on the steady but sapping slopes of the Grande Allée, De Lie had Matthews’ late winning efforts from 2018 and 2019 in mind as a model, but he ended up opening sprint a little sooner than he had anticipated. It hardly mattered. With his hands on the hoods, De Lie delivered an exhibition in kinetic energy, churning a mammoth gear as he swooped past Strong to claim an emphatic victory.

“I tried to manage myself on the final climb without going à bloc, but you’re still having to go pretty much flat out there, to be honest,” De Lie explained. “With 500m or so to go, it flattened out a bit and Florian Vermeersch and Maxim Van Gils protected me so I could save my force for the real finale.

“I’d seen that Matthews had sprinted very late when he won here before and that was my plan too. In the end, I think I launched from quite a long way out, but I was still able to carry a lot of speed because I was in the slipstream of the others. It’s a finale that doesn’t lie. It’s usually the strongest who wins and today that was me.”

European Championships

De Lie has developed the very useful habit of winning sprints, even if he is not entirely convinced that he is a sprinter per se. 

“A lot of people tell me that I’m a sprinter, but I’m still missing something in a really flat sprint,” he said. “But in a sprint like today, where it’s about strength, that’s something different. I won La Polynormande in France, which has a similar finale, so I knew I could come here with a lot of ambition.”

The level of opposition was altogether different in Québec, of course. De Lie’s first victory at this level was a confirmation of his gifts, though he had already signalled his quality with his performances to date, including a fine second place finish at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in February. Still, clocking up a WorldTour win was a box he was eager to tick before season’s end.

“My big goal was to win a WorldTour race and now I’ve done it, so my season is a success,” De Lie said. “It’s the nicest win of my career, the Canadian races are very important in the calendar. This is a young classic, it’s only existed since 2010, so not a lot of people have it on their palmarès, and now I can say I’m one of them.”

There may yet be more lines to added to De Lie’s palmarès in the final weeks of the campaign. Although he suggested Sunday’s GP de Montréal was too hilly for his liking, the youngster will line up among the favourites for the European Championships in Drenthe in a fortnight’s time, where he will share leadership of the Belgian squad with Wout van Aert.

“I have a lot of new challenges coming, like the European Championships,” De Lie said. “I have a lot of confidence for that.”