Christophe Laporte won Dwars door Vlaanderen to make it five wins from the five major cobbled races for Jumbo-Visma. Remarkable, but oddly unremarkable. The rider who really got the heart racing on Wednesday was the one who bounced his bike over the line 15 seconds later: Oier Lazkano.
Laporte's solo victory felt oddly flat - routine, run-of-the-mill - but Lazkano's ride was anything but. A Jumbo-Visma victory is easy to predict but a 23-year-old Movistar rider finishing second - after being in the breakaway all day - will have been on no one's bingo card.
"I'm so, so happy with my second place here, it's amazing," Lazkano said. "It’s very special and beautiful to finish on the podium of a race like this. It's not the Tour of Flanders but you know how important they are for the Belgian people."
Lazkano defied expectations and made his breakthrough with a barnstorming ride, first making the breakaway and then surviving as it whittled down over the cobbles and climbs in the Flemish Ardennes. He formed a scintillating partnership with Alexander Kristoff (Uno-X) to go deep into the finale and it looked momentarily like they might just stay away to contest the win.
However, despite being rounded upon by the eight-man group of favourites, Lazkano went again, somehow finding the strength to go after a Neilson Powless attack and hold him - and the bunch - off in the final metres.
"The big objective for us is in these races to get in the break - just getting ahead of the bunch is a big moment, and quite often, being ahead you don’t spend as much energy as you would in the bunch with the whiplash effect. So that was the idea, to get in the break, I got in the break and I felt good," Lazkano said.
"When they caught us, I saw lots of attacks going and I saw there were two guys from each team, I saw that Powless went for it at 3km to go and I thought I’d got to give it everything I have.
"No one had any power left. The people coming from the chase group were also very tired. They are great riders but no one had anything left."
Lazkano turned 23 in November and is riding his second season at the WorldTour level after catching Movistar's eye during his first two seasons as a pro at the Spanish second-division squad Caja Rural.
His performance at Dwars door Vlaanderen may have come as a surprise to many, but inside his Movistar team, they were just waiting for his power to come out on the big stage.
"Oier is a super super strong rider. He has tremendous strength," Movistar's director José Vicente García Acosta told Cyclingnews at the finish in Waregem.
'Strong' was an adjective Acosta used repeatedly to describe his rider, who stands at 189cm tall with a relatively slim waist but tree trunks for legs. It became clear - as if it hadn't already from watching the race - that the Basque man is not one of the peloton's more cultured pedallers, instead hammering the power from his legs.
He does his best work attacking from far, going hard for a very long time
Vicente García Acosta
'Bruto' was one of the words Acosta used to describe his rider - translating to brutish, or animalistic. He also pointed to a word more common in the Basque Country - 'Casero' - which would mean something like homespun or unsophisticated.
In short, he would appear to fit with the traditional archetype of a Flemish Classics rider - something rare for Spain and even more so for Movistar.
Acosta pointed to the races Lazkano has won - a stage of the Volta a Portugal in 2020 and a stage of the Tour de Wallonie in Belgium last year - as further evidence of the style of rider Lazkano is.
"He does his best work attacking from far, going hard for a very long time. He can sustain really high power. He's just strong," he said.
"We were excited to see how he'd get on here in Belgium, but then he got ill so we had to send him home and he missed E3 and Gent-Wevelgem. This morning I said the same thing I always say to him: 'the important thing is to be in the breakaway, then look at the situation'. We knew he can go far and he went super far. The guy was immense today."
Part of the reason for getting into the breakaway is that Lazkano isn't the most comfortable in the peloton. He spoke of a 'whiplash effect' and Acosta suggested a 'fear' of riding in the bunch. Where he's best, it seems, is up front with an open road to get his head down and crack on.
"He has a few things to polish up on, but these are things that half the peloton and most young guys have to polish as well," Acosta said.
Anyone who finishes on the podium at Dwars door Vlaanderen is automatically greeted with some sort of favourite status for Sunday's Tour of Flanders, but Lazkano was keen to play down any overhyping of his ride.
"I don't think so," he said, laughing at talk of being the 'next Spanish sensation' in the Classics and pointing to Ivan Cortina and Matteo Jorgenson as Movistar's leaders for Flanders.
Lazkano's aim? The same again: "Get in a breakaway, even though that's what everyone wants to do, but the goal is to keep on trying and trying."
