If there was one rider who looked - albeit briefly - as if they could challenge Mathieu van der Poel's crushing domination in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday, it was Florian Vermeersch, whose attack on the Molenberg saw one major contender briefly put some daylight between himself and the all-conquering Dutchman.
Instead, things reverted to their expected course as Van der Poel first caught up with the UAE Team Emirates-XRG racer and then went on to shed the Belgian, fellow counter-attacker Tim van Dijke (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and the remnants of the early breakaway.
In the earliest phases of the move from the Molenberg, Vermeersch collaborated with Van der Poel to help the move stay clear. He then perhaps paid a price for it later on when he was unable to fight against Van Dijke in the battle for third. But as he said later, he would prefer to try to go for victory and then lose than simply ride conservatively and end up wondering about what might have been later on.
Van der Poel himself backed Vermeersch's attitude, giving him a big hug on the finishing straight in a sign of mutual respect between the two racers and later telling journalists that he was not surprised Vermeersch had opted to work with him.
"If he didn't do what he did, he wouldn't have got on the podium," Van der Poel said. "People sometimes forget that."
Vermeersch himself insisted that he had been racing to win at least as far as the Muur van Geraardsbergen and that he did not feel so much weaker than Van der Poel, either.
"Maybe I raced a bit naively," the former Paris-Roubaix podium finisher said, "But I believe I'll be able to beat him one day. Mathieu can have a bad day, and I could have a good one."
"If there's a chance to fight for the win, then you have fight for it. I believe that to be the case in all of the Classics, I do."
Nor had he found himself on the front on the Molenberg by chance, he explained. Rather, teammate Julian Johansen had given him a faultless leadout. "He's one of the MVPs of today's race," Vermeersch insisted. Then, once Van der Poel had just skirted around fallen Tudor rider Rick Pluimers and bridged across to the Belgian, it was game on.
"It wasn't a difficult choice for me," he said. "I wanted as big a gap as possible to the peloton heading into the Muur.
"I'd rather ride like that than ride super defensively, get caught, and not finish in the top twenty."
He had had chain issues on the Muur, he said, but it had made little difference in real terms, perhaps costing him five seconds at most.
By then, Van der Poel was long in the wind and away. Nor did he regret that his earlier efforts made it harder for him to fight for second place against Van Dijke in the finale, 16km further on.
"I'm certainly not disappointed with that third place, I'm mainly happy with the way I raced," he said. "I went into battle with Mathieu, and I lost, but I prefer to race that way rather than defensively. When you run into somebody who's better than you, that's just the way it is."
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