When the gap between a dwindling E3 Harelbeke peloton and Peter Sagan, Geraint Thomas, and Zdenek Stybar had gone out to around one minute as the riders approached the finish line, it became clear that a victory in first Belgian Classic of the 2015 WorldTour would soon grace the palmares of one of the three riders up the road. One of them, Peter Sagan, had already won the race the year prior by outsprinting a small group of companions at the line, a group that included another member of the trio now fighting for this year’s honors, Geraint Thomas.
Given Sagan’s impressive array of abilities, it was only natural for the third member of the trio to be focusing on the Slovakian defending champion in the waning moments of this year’s race over a rider he’d beaten here last year. But Zdenek Stybar’s decision to mark Sagan at the 2015 E3 Harelbeke did not pay off. Geraint Thomas launched a powerful attack in the last few kilometers of the race, and Stybar immediately got on Sagan’s wheel thinking the younger rider would give chase—but Sagan was cooked, and he faded immediately, leaving Stybar to launch an unsuccessful attempt to bridge a gap that had now grown too far.
“I expected that Sagan would be a bit stronger, but he wasn’t,” Zdenek Stybar said after the race.
Few would fault Stybar for such an expectation. Unfortunately for the former world cyclocross champion, the tremendous strength of Thomas left no room for error in the E3 finale.
“He was really, really impressive the last four kilometers. I knew that if he went, I’d have to jump in his wheel but I thought that Sagan would do the same, and he didn’t have the legs anymore.”
Sagan was not able to offer much of an explanation as to his sudden loss of power; in a post-race interview outside the Tinkoff-Saxo bus, he seemed at a loss for words when asked what had transpired, saying that something had “turned off.”
“I felt good on Kwaremont but after, it was still a far way to go to the finish,” he said. Somewhere in between that difficult climb and the final 4 kilometers, Sagan ran out of gas. However it happened, and whenever he realized that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel, his surprise power failure was a pivotal moment in the race.
After narrowly missing out on E3, Stybar and Sagan are already looking to next week’s Ronde van Vlaanderen, where the absence of one of two would-be top contenders (Fabian Cancellara and Tom Boonen) will certainly alter the narrative of the race. But when asked about what the upcoming Tour of Flanders might be like with its now somewhat reduced cast of star protagonists, both Stybar and Sagan were quick to point out there was plenty of competition still out there.
“There are still enough guys who want to win the race,” said Stybar.
“There’s also a lot of other riders who are really strong and we’ll have to see in the race,” said Sagan.
In a day full of surprises, that agreement in the opinions of the two riders should not be much of a surprise: they both had front row seats to the show put on by one of strongest of those other riders today, one who will be hungry for more success in next week’s Ronde.
-Dane Cash
Photo by Reginald Dierckx.
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