The Paterberg rarely lies. The final climb of the Tour of Flanders was the decisive one at the E3 Saxo Bank Classic as the Jumbo-Visma duo of Wout van Aert and Christophe Laporte disappeared from view with a startling show of force with more than 40km still to race, not to be seen again until they were mounting the podium in Harelbeke.
Twelve months ago, Kasper Asgreen availed of his team's strength in numbers to emerge victorious in Harelbeke. This time out, the Dane was again QuickStep-AlphaVinyl's best performer, albeit in 10th place, and he was the team's only representative in the chasing group that came home 1:36 down on the unassailable Jumbo-Visma tandem.
"He was stronger than me," Asgreen said simply of Van Aert when he drew up in the mixed zone afterwards.
His disappointment was palpable but, as the defending champion, he felt duty-bound to speak. The race, in any case, seemed to bear out what he had said in his press conference the previous afternoon, when he acknowledged that Jumbo-Visma had, for now at least, superseded QuickStep as the strongest collective unit on the cobbles.
"It is what it is. Jumbo is going really well at the moment and I just didn't have the legs to follow," said Asgreen, who downplayed the idea that his bout of COVID-19 in February had affected his performance here.
In the intervening period, after all, he placed third at Strade Bianche, a race where he maintained he was at the upper limit of his capabilities.
"Normally, I would say the illness I had five or six weeks ago shouldn't affect me anymore, but clearly my shape is not good enough to follow Jumbo right now," said Asgreen, who was asked if he was still short of the form that carried him to victory in Harelbeke and at the Tour of Flanders in 2021.
"Normally I wouldn't think so, but I'm just not as good as them."
QuickStep had brought their weight of numbers to bear on the past three editions of E3 Harelbeke, claiming victory through Niki Terpstra, Zdenek Stybar and Asgreen, and leaving their rivals to ponder how, precisely, the self-styled Wolf Pack might be knocked off their stride at the Ronde a week later.
This time out, QuickStep find themselves in the unfamiliar position of trying to figure out how to beat not only a redoubtable individual in Van Aert, but an overwhelmingly strong collective in Jumbo-Visma.
Tiesj Benoot placed ninth on Friday after policing the chasers in the finale, while Mike Teunissen and Nathan Van Hooydonck were also prominent in laying the groundwork. At this juncture, Van Aert is the outright favourite for the Ronde.
"For sure it's possible to beat him, we just have to figure out how," Asgreen said. "We'll go back home now and analyse the race and try to come up with a better plan for next time."
'As a team, we are closing the gap'
Outside the QuickStep-AlphaVinyl bus, directeur sportif Tom Steels had already begun that analysis, maintaining that his team was not so far off the pace and citing some mitigation in the absence of Yves Lampaert, who was withheld for Gent-Wevelgem after suffering illness at Paris-Nice.
"We learned we're not so far back," Steels told Cyclingnews. "As a team, we are closing the gap. We had many sick people in the approach to these races, so we tried to recover as much as possible, and to mix a little bit the riders to give them extra recovery. And now we hope to close the gap."
When Van Aert made his first acceleration on the Taaienberg with 80km to go, it was already clear that this was going to be a race disputed on Jumbo-Visma's terms. The climb, once Tom Boonen's favoured test site, now served to shape the race to Van Aert's liking, with QuickStep for once on the back foot.
In the group of seven riders that formed over the top, three were from Jumbo-Visma, while Asgreen was alone for QuickStep.
That selection later swelled to a 16-man group, with three QuickStep riders aboard, but Davide Ballerini didn't survive long at the front, while Florian Sénéchal suffered an untimely puncture. In the finale, Asgreen was isolated all over again, even if there was precious little to be done against Jumbo-Visma's blunt force on the Paterberg.
"At a certain point, there was 16 riders in front and we had three guys up there. Of course, Ballerini had to drop back and that was not OK, and there was also the flat tyre of Florian," Steels said.
"Then they went on the Paterberg, which is a very specific climb, because if you're not there in the gutter on the wheel, then you always get in trouble. We know that because we did it already a few times before, but that doesn't mean they were not strong.
"They were very strong, Van Aert and Laporte. And if you give them 10 seconds, you always get in trouble to close the gap, so chapeau to them, that's for sure."
Asgreen, at least, was in the same race as Van Aert and Laporte for as long as anybody else, but his isolation in the finale meant he had limited scope for manoeuvre.
"Kasper is OK, but of course, if he ends up one against three, it's always difficult," said Steels. A little over a week from the Ronde, therein lies the conundrum.
