It was another nearly-but-not-quite day for Greg Van Avermaet (BMC) at the Tour of Flanders, as he added a third place to the second that he took a year ago. Van Avermaet appeared to be the only one that was able to make a concerted effort in tracking down the leading duo of Alexander Kristoff (Katusha) and Niki Terpstra (Etixx-QuickStep) - although he had Peter Sagan (Tinkoff-Saxo) for company for a few kilometres - and he felt like he could have got more from the day.
“In the end, I’m happy that I got on the podium but I had the legs to win I think,” Van Avermaet said at the finish.
There were doubts about Van Avermaet’s form leading into the race after a heavy fall during E3 Harelbeke, where he was propelled over his handlebars and landed heavily on his hip. He was able to finish the race but still showed signs of the fall when he took part in Gent-Wevelgem last Sunday. However, that was gone by the time he took to the start in Bruges.
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“I was feeling really good the whole way and I tried to make the race hard and when they went, Kristoff and Terpstra, there were still some teams to control the race,” he said. “I tried on the Paterberg with all that I had, and I had Sagan with me but he also wasn’t so strong anymore. I was just hoping that they would wait for me because Kristoff was so much faster than Terpstra in the finish. Last year they didn’t want to ride with me when I was with (Stijn) Vandenbergh so I was hoping that I could come back but I couldn’t make it any more.”
BMC had a major number advantage in the latter part of the race with Daniel Oss shepherding his leader and ably keeping him out of trouble, while Jempy Drucker and Marcus Burghardt present throughout most of the day. Usually that would see the team put the hammer down on the front of the group but BMC directeur sportif Valerio Piva told Cyclingnews that they decided to take a different approach to proceedings.
“I am happy with how our team did today. We changed our tactics a little bit today, we waited a lot,” explained Piva. “Everybody is always looking to BMC to close the gap and today we jumped only and we didn’t move until the final. We always had four or five guys in the front group, we controlled the race and we waited for the attack from Greg.”
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