Luck. It’s a funny thing. It’s a horrible thing, too. You either have it or you don’t have it. To win a cobbled Classic – any one of those twisty, narrow, bumpy and often grimy northern European spring sufferfests – you need luck, and quite often a lot of it. What you don’t need is bad luck. Misfortune doesn’t tend to breed a winner.
At Dwars door Vlaanderen, the final race ahead of the big one, Sunday’s Tour of Flanders, luck – and a lack of it – dictated how the race went. Skill, tactics, nerve, precision and brute power were all heavy parts of the equation too – but luck was the dominant factor.
Filippo Ganna, better known as one of his generation’s pre-eminent time triallists, has only sporadically flirted with the Belgian Classics in his career. 10th in 2023 at E3 Saxo Classic, he was third at the same race last year, and a few days later placed eighth at Flanders. Over the border and into France at nearby Paris-Roubaix – less hilly but certainly more cobble-y – he has finished 6th, 13th and had a couple of dreams die as a result of mistimed mechanicals. Luck, on those occasions, hasn’t been with him.
Towards the end of the 2026 edition of Dwars, it wasn't with him, either. Ganna came into the race as one of the minor contenders – we’ll come onto the outright favourite Wout van Aert shortly – but with 47km to go a rather big problem struck him: his front wheel broke. Not what you want at the exact moment the race was hotting up, with Van Aert the instigator.
A bike change ensued and Ganna caught the peloton again, but then with 39km remaining he was again off his bike. The problem this time was broken handlebars. A simple bike change was made all the more complicated by the fact that eight kilometres earlier Ineos Grenadiers staff had already attended to a Ganna mechanical. What should have been a fast pit stop ended up being drawn out, each second feeling like a minute. Lady Luck was not watching over him.
It meant Ganna had to go into time trial mode for 13km before he could regain touch with the chasing group, by which time Van Aert – rejuvenated and definitely in race-winning form – was at the head of the race with Unibet Rose Rockets’ Niklas Larsen, who he distanced with 10km to go. The small gap to the peloton behind was surmountable, but the probability-meter was pointing most favourably towards a Van Aert triumph. So often burdened by terrible luck, this time Van Aert appeared to have fate on his side.
At 3km to go, though, Ganna decided to try his luck – again. After two mishaps in the previous hour, would it be third time lucky? With the seconds to Van Aert narrowing, Ganna shot out of the reduced peloton alongside one of this campaign’s most active Classics riders, UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s Florian Vermeersch. It wasn’t long before Ganna used his brute power – all 193cm and 83kg of it – to go beyond Vermeersch and chase Van Aert down himself.
This Classics season has been characterised by dramatic, hearts-in-mouth last-gasp finishes, and Ganna was intent on creating another one. Van Aert, out front for more than 30 minutes and closing in on what would be his biggest one-day victory since E3 three years ago, was praying that his luck would not be about to turn against him. Not at this race especially, the place where he was out-sprinted by Neilson Powless last year and broke multiple bones the previous year. It's a race that has become cursed for him – he wouldn’t add another chapter to that horror story, would he? Surely not?
He would. With 100 metres to go, a rampant, raging and rapid Ganna passed him, the Italian sitting up on his third bike of the day before the line to celebrate a quite unbelievable and unforeseen victory. “I thought the race was done for me,” the 29-year-old expressed at the finish, taking in his first ever one-day victory. “But I never gave up. I tried to fight until the end.
“All day we were a bit unlucky. After the first hill, I broke my front wheel and had to change my bike for the first time. And then I broke my handlebars. After the second bike change, I thought the race was done for me. But I never gave up.”
Van Aert, meanwhile, was left screaming into a void. Why me again, he must surely have been muttering. Second, yet again. The Eternal Second really isn’t a title that only belongs to Raymond Poulidor. “It’s of course frustrating when you’re so close," he sighed. “You believe for an hour that you can win the race, and then it slips through your fingers in the final ten seconds. I tried to focus on my effort and not look behind, but in the end the race was 150 metres too long.”
That’s the thin, dividing and very often agonising line between having luck and not having luck. It turned for Ganna at Dwars, in his favour, and it turned for Van Aert, too – but against him. That’s cycling. That's the Classics. That’s what makes them so enthralling. Lucky for us spectators that there’s still a week-and-a-bit to go of them. Van Aert is desperate for Lady Luck to finally shine over him.
