Success may have come quite late to Greg Van Avermaet (BMC Racing), but he’s determined to cram as much as possible into the remaining years of his career, setting his sights on the Tour of Flanders in 2018, along with Strade Bianche and the Amstel Gold Race.
Van Avermaet was for so long the nearly-man of Belgian cycling, racking up an slew of podiums and top-five placings while the big wins escaped his grasp. How distant that incarnation now seems. The turning point has been attributed to his first Tour de France stage win in 2015. The following season he won Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the GP de Montreal, and the Olympic Games road race, along with another Tour stage and a stint in the yellow jersey.
His 2017 campaign, however, was something else, with victories at Omloop, E3 Harelbeke, and Gent-Wevelgem leading to a first Monument scalp – after 11 top-10s and seven top-fives – at Paris-Roubaix. He was second at Tour of Flanders and Strade Bianche to boot.
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“This year everything came together,” Van Avermaet told Cyclingnews in Japan last week, 10 days after being crowned the 2017 WorldTour winner. “Big wins in Belgium, then Paris-Roubaix on top of it – for me it was a really important step in my career. I’m finally where I wanted to be.
“Last year and the year before were really good but I never really won a big thing in the spring, and I’m a classics guy so that’s the most important thing. I’m very happy that I achieved things because for a long time I was the guy who never won but was always there, and finally I made the step to go to the winning part.”
Van Avermaet can’t quite put his finger on the reason for his remarkable transformation from nearly-man to world-beater, nor can he bring himself to regret that things didn’t click into place sooner.
2018 goals
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