Tour de France 2019: Greg van Avermaet on the burden of Belgium, dealing with defeat and the yellow jersey

A few months ago, Greg van Avermaet was approaching the Poggio, the decisive final ascent of Milan-San Remo: one of the five Monuments of road cycling, and a race he has never won. The day was going well and van Avermaet, the reigning Olympic champion and one of the world’s pre-eminent one-day racers, felt strong. But as the jostling pack reached the foot of the climb, all of a sudden something didn’t quite sit right.

When you have spent your life riding in bunches, you get a sort of sixth sense for where the big attack is going to come, and where you are in relation to it. As the critical break materialised, van Avermaet immediately realised he had allowed himself to slip too far back. Frantically he searched for a gap, only to find himself blocked, nudged, outmanoeuvred. As Julian Alaphilippe of France sprinted clear to claim the biggest win of his career, van Avermaet trailed in 42nd place. After almost 300 flawless kilometres in the saddle, his race had evaporated in the space of a few seconds.

Afterwards, the normally mild-mannered and courteous Van Avermaet was furious. He marched wordlessly straight past the waiting television cameras, and for the first time that anyone on his CCC team could remember, refused to speak to the press. “I don’t like to see guys happy at the finish if it didn’t go the right way,” he says now. “If you have high expectations, you have to feel defeated. If you don’t have this, you don’t have any ambition.”

It’s a couple of months later, and van Avermaet is sitting in a hotel bar on the outskirts of Leeds, philosophising on the fine line between success and failure. On the maddening caprice of a sport where your own skill and hard work guarantee nothing on their own. Where the greatest rider with the best preparation can do everything right for six hours, only for someone to crash, or a team-mate to flag, at exactly the worst moment.

“It’s super-hard,” he says. “And also hard to explain to people. They think: ‘you lost, you’re not as strong as this guy’. But it’s about details: making the right choices, being in the right position in the sprint. Sometimes you’re 12th or 10th, and you’re stronger than the winner. That’s hard to deal with. In football, you win, you draw or you lose. Cycling… it’s a lot of losing.”

Van Avermaet could have been a footballer. He played in goal for his local team in Belgium, but in a part of the world where great cyclists are more revered than any other kind of athlete, it was the call of the road, and the chance to emulate his father and grandfather – both pro riders – that ultimately grabbed him. Now, at the age of 34, he’s won plenty: Olympic gold in 2016, Paris-Roubaix in 2017, two stages and 11 days in the yellow jersey at the Tour de France, where he will return this weekend. But the defeats still sting hardest.

“I’m never angry when I cannot do better,” he says. “If you get dropped on the road, it’s easy. But if you have the feeling you were capable of doing better, then it’s really hard. That’s why I say the mental part of cycling is really underestimated.”

It’s a game that van Avermaet has spent half a lifetime trying to master. To pedal the hills of Flanders is to take possession of a treasured inheritance. It takes a certain leap of imagination, coming from a largely cycling-agnostic country like our own, to grasp just how seriously Belgians take their cycling. From Merckx to Museeuw to Boonen, the greatest Classics riders are feted like national heroes. It’s telling that when van Avermaet met Tottenham Hotspur’s Jan Vertonghen to film an advert last year, it was Vertonghen – a massive cycling fan – who was the one starstruck.

The great Peter Sagan recently said that to be Belgian in the sport was a double-edged sword. The opportunities and rewards are legion, but equally: “there’s so much history piled on these guys’ shoulders”. Does van Avermaet agree?

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“Yeah, I feel it,” he replies. “It’s not always a benefit to be a Belgian guy. You carry the history. It’s really nice that we have a lot of support and a lot of fans. You feel a lot of respect. But it’s sometimes hard to handle all the pressure. With me, when I was becoming professional, they directly call you ‘the new Tom Boonen’. That’s how the country works. If something happens with me, it’s a full page in the newspaper. And sometimes it affects your feelings a little bit.”

After a stellar start to his junior career, it took van Avermaet some years to meet the expectations invested in him. There were numerous top-10 finishes, an agonising defeat to Fabian Cancellara in the 2014 Tour of Flanders, a fifth place in the world championships of the same year. A surprise Olympic gold, on a Rio course expected to favour the pure climbers, came at the age of 31, and was followed by a host of big wins in 2017. Finally, after more than a decade in the sport, van Avermaet had shifted his reputation as an honest nearly-man.

And although the wins have dried up a little over the last couple of seasons, as his BMC team passed into new ownership and trusted team-mates like Richie Porte, Rohan Dennis and Tejay van Garderen departed, success has sweetened the multiple pills of failure. “It gets easier by the years,” van Avermaet says when asked how he deals with defeat. “For me, I was always reaching for a big goal, like the Olympics. When I finally won this, it was a big relief. I could finally say my career was successful. And afterwards, you can live with the losses from before, and the losses you have now.” The big miss at Milan-San Remo in March, he says, took him “one day” to get over.

In a sport replete with living legends, cult heroes and fresh young things, it’s fair to say van Avermaet is one of those riders who inspires reverence rather than genuine love. He doesn’t have the crowd-pleasing ostentation of a Sagan, the storied hero-worship of his fellow Belgians Boonen or Philippe Gilbert, the electrifying newness of the young Dutch cyclo-cross star Mathieu van der Poel. What van Avermaet offers instead is a sort of old-school integrity: an authentic, unstarry manner and a deep reverence for the sport’s traditions, which when allied to a murderous work ethic and a gift for tactics, makes him one of the most respected one-day racers on the planet. Off the bike, he’s decent, intelligent, engaging company. On it, he wants you beaten.

“You need a kind of anger – a push – to be the best,” he says. “As a sportsman, you have an ego. If you don’t have this, it’s really hard to keep up. You need to have this fire inside yourself. And you always have to put the wood on it, keep it burning. If you don’t put wood, your career is fast over.”

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The good thing about being a rider as versatile as van Avermaet is that wood is easy to come by. A first win at the Tour of Flanders, he says is “the biggest thing that is missing” from his roll of honour. “But also Roubaix a second time. Amstel. Liege. Those are my big goals in cycling. Then I want to be world champion. And I want to go to Tokyo [in 2020] and defend my Olympic title.”

But first to Brussels, where this year’s Tour begins in honour of the 50th anniversary of Eddy Merckx’s first win – there you are, the burden of history again. And while van Avermaet won’t be riding for the general classification, there are several opportunities for stage wins, particularly now Porte’s departure has left CCC without a genuine GC contender. Last year, he claimed the yellow jersey after the team time trial on stage three and held onto it for over a week, beyond the first rest day and into the Alps, before finally relinquishing it to Geraint Thomas. “The Tour is really important,” he says. “I was really happy to wear the yellow jersey. For me, it was one of my dreams as a kid.”

And so you might say that for a rider who has spent most of his career trying to manage the weight of pressure, the next few weeks finally offer van Avermaet a chance to race without it. To mix things up, get in the break, enjoy the ride. “A lot of riders have lost the feeling a bit,” he says. “They see it more as work. For me, it’s not work. It’s still my hobby, and I enjoy it every day. This is my job. But I realise every day that this is also my dream life.”