It was all going to plan. Team Visma-Lease a Bike had all the cards — three teammates in the front group against a rider from a team starved of wins this season. They had the pick of three options for victories, all of which were primed for the Flemish press’ headlines: ‘Much needed confidence boost for Wout van Aert’ or ‘Loyal Tiesj Benoot rewarded with a career-defining Classic’ or ‘Historic consecutive win for American Matteo Jorgenson’.
Each of these outcomes would have been the result of one of the riders taking the Dwars door Vlaanderen 2025 title. Except they didn’t. It was a consecutive American win at the Classic — not for Jorgenson, but rather it was EF Education-EasyPost’s Neilson Powless with his arms a loft and the Visma riders’ heads bowed.
Everyone was in shock but for different reasons — Powless couldn’t believe what he had done, Visma couldn’t believe what they had done. After launching Van Aert, Jorgensen, and Benoot with over 70km to go, and catching the earlier group, which included Powless, it looked for all the world that the team would repeat their 2024 win and perhaps better it by avenging Van Aert’s horror crash at last year’s edition.
Crucially, pre-race favourites Mads Pedersen, Jasper Philipsen and Biniam Girmay were caught behind in the second group when the Visma move went. The tables seemed to be turning on a difficult Classics campaign. The Dutch squad’s principal rival teams, Mathieu van der Poel’s Alpecin-Deceuninck and Tadej Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates-XRG, although without their leaders present, were having races to forget — Jasper Philipsen was dropped from the second group and Nils Politt was unfortunately injured after a crash.
It was vintage Visma, echoing the famous 1-2-3 on the first stage of the 2022 Paris-Nice or Van Aert’s stage winning launch at the Tour de France the same year. But now, 2022 seems like a long time ago.
What happened? At the finish, last year’s winner Jorgenson told reporters in simple terms what stopped them from capitalising on what had been up until the very end, a massive success for the team: “We made the wrong decision”. He was talking about the choice to bring it to a sprint, which he said was decided 10km from the line.
It came down to the last 200 metres after 184 kilometres of racing. Cycling is about fine margins. Van Aert knows what it’s like to lose his home Monument Tour of Flanders by millimetres when he missed out to Van der Poel in 2020. The Visma riders were dejected at the finish.
What difference does Wednesday’s disappointment mean for Sunday’s crucial Ronde van Vlaanderen? Confidence will certainly be down after the defeat. However, this was by far Visma’s most impressive performance this Spring Classics campaign — they very nearly came away with an astonishing win given the team and their leader Van Aert had been written off by many after a string of disappointments so far this season. He chose to skip a couple of races and went to Tenerife to train at altitude instead; his lack of finishing sprint may have been a result of this. For all that he lost to Powless, it doesn’t take away from the team’s impressive display for the majority of the race. They nearly played it perfectly. Nearly.
A word must go to Powless’ remarkable victory. In some quarters Dwars Door Vlaanderen 2025 will be remembered as the edition that Visma lost but in fact it was the one which Neilson Powless won. At the finish he said: “This is the biggest win of my life”. It was certainly big — for him and for his team. Competing against the super teams like Visma on the budget of a team like EF’s is difficult.
Another winner today was cycling itself. In recent years, we have seen favourites take the wins left, right and centre. Today, a lone rider held his own against three teammates from one of cycling’s biggest squads, and won against a generational talent. Surprises like this make the sport what it is — engaging, pulsating and suspenseful.
Powless did profit from some luck in Visma making the wrong choice to back Van Aert’s sprint but that’s what cycling is like sometimes. Cycling is too competitive for wrong decisions not to be punished.
Yes, it was the wrong play in the end but the blueprint is there for Visma to challenge at De Ronde and Paris-Roubaix. It was enough to get the better of Mads Pedersen, who only three days ago produced a Pogačar-esque long range attack to win Gent-Wevelgem. If Visma can produce something similar — with a few tweaks — they may well save their Spring Classics campaign. All is certainly not lost.
