Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin Deceuninck) helped drive the pace in a break that launched with 88km to go on stage 1 of the Baloise Belgium Tour, spending much of the day on the attack, but even when the front group was caught at just over 2km to go the Dutch rider stayed up the front.
Van der Poel's work to set up the stage for sprinter Jasper Philipsen was not yet done. The rider slotted into his place in the Alpecin Deceuninck lead-out train and shepherding the sprinter until the last hundred metres of the race to finish off a day of work at the front that started before the stage was even halfway through.
“Let me first say that it was not my idea to go on the attack at 88 kilometers from the finish,” Van der Poel told Dutch and Belgian cycling media, including Wielerflits and HLN. “Well, I'm not hard to convince. The team wants to make the game difficult a little earlier. Jasper can handle a tough race better than the other sprinters."
As Philipsen sprinted to the line to take victory in the first stage of the Baloise Belgium Tour, Van der Poel sat up behind and, with arm raised at the team victory, still crossed the line in sixth place. That also put him in second on the overall behind Philipsen, as he clinched eight seconds in the ‘Golden Kilometre’ intermediate sprints.
The stage win and strong overall position at the 2.Pro tour for the team was worth celebrating for Van der Poel, who said "I want it to count when I start somewhere”, but there was also a bigger picture at play. It is now little more than two weeks away from the Tour de France Grand Départ in Bilbao, Spain on July 1.
“I notice that my form is already better here than five days ago in the Hageland”, said Van der Poel after finishing 13th at Dwars door het Hageland, which marked his first race back since Paris-Roubaix. “I often need a few races to be really super."
Many rivals, including Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma), are using the Tour de Suisse as a final Tour de France tune up instead but the Van der Poel seemed content with his choice after the opening day of the five day tour in Belgium.
"A day like today is exactly why I'm here and not in Switzerland," said Van der Poel. "I hope that I recover well and that I can also race attractively in the other stages in the coming days.”
Next up in the Baloise Belgium Tour is a relatively flat 176km stage from Merelbeke to Knokke-Heist, then for stage 3 it is a 15.2km individual time trial before the race moves onto a challenging circuit from Durbuy for stage 4, delivering 173km of racing regularly punctuated by climbs. The race then heads to Brussels from the finale, with a 195km stage 5.
