THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

There’s an old cycling saw, beloved of TV commentators, known as ‘Chapatte’s Law’. It’s a rule of thumb stating that a break needs a minute per 10km to hold off a chasing peloton, named after Robert Chapatte, the French commentator who came up with the formula. Of course, Chapatte’s Law is years out of date - modern race dynamics are a lot different from 40 years ago. But what Chapatte would have made of the 2019 Amstel Gold is anybody’s guess.

With 3km to go, Julian Alaphilippe and Jakob Fuglsang held a lead of 18 seconds over Michał Kwiatkowski and Matteo Trentin. Next: Max Schachmann at about 30, then Bauke Mollema and Simon Clarke at 40 and a quintet led by Mathieu van der Poel another handful of seconds back. Alaphilippe and Fuglsang had been away for 40km; it looked like they would contest the win, with third going to Kwiatkowski, who’d been dropping Trentin on the hills. The time gaps should have been enough. But the gaps shown on TV were out. At 3km to go, the pictures said group two - Kwiatkowski and Trentin - was at 37 seconds and group three - Schachmann? Mollema? The Van der Poel group? - was at a minute.

Perhaps that explains Alaphilippe and Fuglsang starting to play games. They slowed almost to a halt, and it was only when they saw Kwiatkowski closing fast into the final kilometre that they woke up. Even more impressively, Van der Poel had singlehandedly led the pursuit by his group, and he closed the gap first to Mollema and Clarke, then shut down the leaders and astonishingly passed them in the final 100 metres.Van der Poel had definitively broken Chapatte’s Law, but more than that, his incredible comeback and smashed all our preconceptions of what is possible in a bike race.