When teams are making a plan to win a race, their tactics will be based on exploiting a physical weakness in a rider or team, not by looking at what's going on in the media. But, no matter how unusual, that's the approach EF Education-EasyPost took when scheming how to deliver Neilson Powless to the win in Dwars door Vlaanderen on Wednesday.
Going into the mid-week race, there was immense pressure on Wout van Aert to perform and fight back against the criticism levelled at him every day this week in the press in Belgium and beyond. That pressure wasn't necessarily coming from the team and wouldn't always affect the racing, but EF found a way to capitalise on it.
