Men’s Tour of Flanders Ends With Kasper Asgreen’s Thrilling Sprint for the Win
The men’s and women’s Tour of Flanders was raced in Belgium on Easter Sunday. Here’s all you need to know about what went down in country’s biggest one-day race.
Who Won?
Denmark’s Kasper Asgreen (Elegant-Quick Step) won the 2021 men’s Tour of Flanders, out-sprinting the defending champion, Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Fenix) of the Netherlands, to take the biggest win of his career. The second Dane to win “The Ronde,” Asgreen followed every move in the tense final hour of the race and timed his sprint perfectly, overtaking van der Poel in the final 100 meters to win the cobbled Monument. Belgium’s Greg van Avermaet (AG2R-Citro?n) out-sprinted his compatriot Jasper Stuyven (Trek-Segafredo) for third.
Later, Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) of the Netherlands attacked on the final climb of the day, the Paterberg, to win the women’s Tour of Flanders. Every bit as selective as the men’s event, van Vleuten’s team kept her out of harm’s way all afternoon, covering each attack as the group of contenders slowly whittled itself down. When van Vleuten struck, there was little anyone could do to respond on the Paterberg’s steep cobbled slopes. Germany’s Lisa Brennauer (Ceratizit-WNT Pro Cycling Team) won the sprint for second over Australia’s Grace Brown (Team BikeExchange). The win was van Vleuten’s second victory in the Tour of Flanders; she won her first back in 2011.
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Who Should Have Won?
The Tour of Flanders is one of those races in which the strongest rider always wins, and this year’s edition did little to refute that sentiment.
Van Vleuten is a living legend who’s won just about every race on the women’s calendar—many of them multiple times. But after a quiet start to the season, we wondered if she and her team would be able to hold-up against the likes of Anna van der Breggen of SD Worx or Elisa Longo Borghini (Trek-Segafredo). But Sunday proved her win in Wednesday’s Dwars door Vlaanderen was just a bit of foreshadowing—and a message to those underestimating the depth of Movistar.
The men’s race was expected to be a battle between van der Poel, Belgium’s Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma), and the riders from Belgium’s Elegant-Quick Step squad, a team that’s made a business of dominating the cobbled Classics since the mid-1990s and always brings several riders able to win.
Well, that’s exactly what happened with van Aert joining van der Poel and Asgreen in a breakaway with about 27K to go. Van der Poel attacked at the top of the final ascent of the Oude Kwaremont—dropping van Aert—but Asgreen clawed his way back to the Dutchman and rode alongside up the day’s final climb, the Paterberg.
To his credit, Asgreen cooperated with the heavily-favored van der Poel on the run-in to the finish. Forcing van der Poel to start his sprint his first, Asgreen chose the perfect gear and timed his own sprint to perfection: van der Poel sat-up with 50 meters left, conceding the race to the Dane.
What Was the Story?
Asgreen is not a name many fans might recognize, but that should all chance given the results he’s scored since joining the World Tour in 2018. The Dane actually finished second in his first Tour of Flanders (in 2019) and continued his cobbled progression by winning the Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne semi-Classic last year. His victory in last Friday’s E3 Saxo Bank Classic was his biggest breakthrough. Often called the “mini-Tour of Flanders,” several riders have won the E3 only to win Flanders the following weekend. We can now add Asgreen’s name to that list.
His win couldn’t have come at a better time: his Belgian team is looking for a new title sponsor, and the Tour of Flanders is the most important event in the country by-far. By winning the race, Asgreen might have earned himself—and his entire team—a new contract extension.
Before Asgreen’s victory, the story of the day was a series of disqualifications. Yevgeniy Fedorov (Astana-Premier Tech) and Otto Vergaerde (Alpecin Fenix) were disqualified in the first hour after an incident that’s perhaps best described as “road rage.”
But the bigger and less clear-cut DQ came when AG2R-Citro?n’s Michael Sch?r was disqualified for throwing a water bottle to a fan. Cycling’s been trying to crack down on littering as of late and has instituted special “zones” in which riders are free to discard gel wrappers and water bottles on the side of the road. Sch?r—one of the most well-liked riders in the peloton—was clearly trying to send a fan home with a souvenir. But unfortunately, the race referees didn’t agree, imposing the harshest penalty associated with a rule that only went into effect on April 1st.
What Did We Learn?
Despite their best efforts to prove otherwise in recent years, we learned that van der Poel and van Aert are human after all. Van Aert never looked to have what he needed to win Sunday—at least not when he needed it most. It was no surprise when van der Poel’s attack on the Kwaremont gapped him so quickly.
And van der Poel—who everyone wrote-off after his “poor” showing in Wednesday’s Dwars door Vlaanderen—looked to have another Flanders in the bag when he rode clear with Asgreen late in Sunday’s race. But as Asgreen so aptly reminded us, all bets are off at the end of the 260+-kilometer Classic.
We were also reminded of how much we like the way Flanders Classics, the race organizers, schedule their events. By putting the finish of the women’s race after the men’s we were able to enjoy both races live without having to switch back-and-forth from feed to feed and risk missing any of the action.
And last but not least, Sunday’s race reminded us just how much we’ll miss Paris-Roubaix, which was finally postponed (to early-October) late last week. Would Quick Step win the Flanders-Roubaix double? Would van Aert bounce back? How would van der Poel fare in his first Hell of the North? And which woman would win the first women’s Paris-Roubaix?
Sadly, we’ll have to wait six months to get some answers.
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