Strade win is one of a kind for Benoot
If modern cycling’s tactical rulebook consists of a series of mathematical equations, the story of the 2018 Strade Bianche was written in free verse. Chaos reigned as cold, heavy rain washed away the ambition of many. When the peloton split into two in the first hour, those behind never got back on. Then the gluey surface of the race’s eponymous white gravel roads sucked at the riders’ wheels until only a handful remained. The riders were caked in mud thrown up from the roads. Under blue skies and sunshine, Tuscany’s gravel roads are pristine and white, but with heavy clouds and rain they turn into an impasto of sticky mud the colour of burnt sienna. Team tactics? It was barely possible to identify which rider rode for which team, let alone try and work out a plan. With so few riders from each outfit left at the front, few teams had the numbers to do anything other than pedal as hard as they could to the finish.
It was apt, then, that such a rare race should also have a rare winner. Tiesj Benoot, a rider of undoubted strength and potential, emerged through the gloom, his face painted with a wash of murky slurry, to take his first ever pro win. The Lotto Soudal rider has been around the front of some of the world’s biggest races since 2015 – fifth in the Tour of Flanders as a first-year pro, fourth in Paris-Tours, third in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, fifth in the Tour of Poland and even 20th at the Tour de France – but this was the first time he’d crossed the line as the winner. Rare also: the combination of riders who emerged at the front of the race for the finale. As well as Benoot, who
Previous professional race victories for Tiesj Benoot, in four seasons
is an all-rounder but has shown the most potential as a rider of the cobbled Classics, there was a grand tour contender, Romain Bardet, and cyclo-cross specialist, Wout Van Aert. And let’s not forget that in fourth place there was a hilly classics specialist, Alejandro Valverde. It was an unusual combination of rivals, although not unique – think back to the Arenberg stage of the 2014 Tour de France, where Lars Boom (a former cross rider) finished ahead of Vincenzo Nibali and Jakob Fuglsang (GT contenders), then Fabian Cancellara (Classics/time trial specialist).
Benoot’s strength compensated for flawed timing. He missed the mid-race split which put a high quality group of 10, including 2017 winner Micha¯ Kwiatkowski, Valverde and Van Aert, off the front and had to chase. He crossed a 30-second gap on his own. Then, after Bardet and Van Aert rode away with just under 50km to go, he was stuck in the chasing group, 0:40 behind, and he had to do it all over again. Bardet and Van Aert held Benoot at bay, but in the final half hour, the Belgian squeezed the gap closed, then simply rode away once he’d caught them. Bardet ground his way in 39 seconds down in second while Van Aert, his legs cramping and buckling on the steep ramp to the finish, hung on for third. There was no shape to this race. Bardet’s Ag2r team had come the closest to executing a tactical plan, with Pierre Latour in both the early break and then in the 10-rider group that went clear with Kwiatkowski. But while in theory this would have meant rival teams would have to work, the reality was that Latour’s leader Bardet ended up crossing to the leaders on his own. The peloton, barely worthy of the description, kept splitting into single lines of around a dozen. Bora-Hansgrohe had numbers, with four riders in the first 20 or so, and they might have been expected to organise the chase for Peter Sagan. But it was equally clear that nobody really had the legs. All three riders on the podium had proven points, of sorts. Benoot had broken a victory duck which was into its fourth season and had been starting to attract attention. Bardet, accomplished stage racer as he is, had burnished a fast-growing reputation as an exciting and improvisatory oneday racer – one week before, he’d won the Classic de l’Ardèche with a similarly speculative long-range attack. And Van Aert had pundits purring in anticipation of a fulltime switch to road racing. The Belgian has proven just about everything he needs to in cyclocross, having won three world titles, but reaching the podium in a tough one-day WorldTour race like Strade Bianche when he’s still only 23, was impressive. It’s doubtful we’ll see these three riders going head to head again in the same race, but each will focus on their own specialities and targets with renewed motivation.
The gluey surface of the race’s gravel sectors sucked and pulled at the riders’ wheels until only a handful remained