Victory for Danny van Poppel in stage 12 of the Vuelta a Espana was a breakthrough first WorldTour win for the 22-year-old Trek Factory rider - but it also fulfilled expectations that have been swirling around the Dutch sprinter for the best part of three years, or even earlier.
As the son of one of Holland’s top all-time fastmen, John-Paul van Poppel - a points jersey winner in the Tour de France and victorious in stages in all three Grand Tours (including nine in the Vuelta) - van Poppel’s turn of speed quickly brought him to the public’s attention when he turned pro aged 19 in 2013.
And as if the ‘like-father-like-son’ stories weren’t flourishing fast enough thanks to van Poppel senior's prolific sprint success in the 1980s and 1990s, third place in the first stage of the 2013 Tour for Vancansoleil behind Marcel Kittel earned Danny van Poppel an even higher public profile.
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Stage victories in the Tour of Luxemberg and Wallonie as well as third in the 2014 Scheldeprijs and fifth in the Belgian Classic in 2015, represented solid progress for van Poppel. But the ‘big win’ continued to elude him.
Then finally, racing in Trek Factory’s Vuelta line-up alongsie his brother, Boy van Poppel, that win has arrived - in a chaotic bunch sprint in Lleida, the same finish where a certain Mark Cavendish took a Vuelta stage victory back in 2010, when the Grand Tour last visited the Catalan city.
“When I got third in the Tour in that 2013 stage, I was a little bit famous because of that,” van Poppel reflected, “so now it’s important to have got a win in my own right, not because I was once a good young rider in the Tour.”
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