⁍ Mathieu van der Poel won the Tour of Flanders ‘Monument’ classic on Sunday.
⁍ The Dutchman beat Belgian rival Wout Van Aert in a photo-finish sprint.
⁍ World champion Julian Alaphilippe crashed out of the race after a collision with a motorbike.
– The most famous one-day race in the world has a new winner. Dutchman Mathieu Van der Poel beat Belgian rival Wout Van Aert in a photo-finish sprint to win the Tour of Flanders classic on Sunday, reports Reuters. Van der Poel, whose father won the race in 1986, launched the two-man sprint and managed to just hold off Van Aert after 241 kilometers. Norway’s Alexander Kristoff took third place. “They had already called my name twice, but I couldn’t believe it. I’ve asked for confirmation 10 times. I have no words for this. I am speechless,” said Van der Poel, grandson of the late Frenchman Raymond Poulidor, who won another of the Monument classic races—Milan-Sanremo—in 1961. World champion Julian Alaphilippe crashed out of the race after he clipped the back of a race motorbike 35 kilometers from the line. The 26-year-old Van der Poel, riding just in front of the Frenchman, narrowly avoided the bike on the right side of the road. Alaphilippe eventually sat up, holding his right arm and screaming in pain before being attended to by race doctors before being taken to a hospital where x-rays showed two fractures in his hand. “A few motorbikes wanted to go behind us, because our gap was growing, I wanted to take profit as much as possible to go behind the moto, and I think Julian was not concentrating or something,” said Van Aert, who had been looking to become the first rider to win the Tour of Flanders and Milan-Sanremo in the same year since 1975.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cycling-flanders/cycling-van-der-poel-wins-tour-of-flanders-as-alaphilippe-crashes-out-idUSKBN2730JL