Greg Van Avermaet remained true to himself to the last.
All through his career, the Belgian was a model of composure, modest in victory and calm in defeat, and he was equally phlegmatic when it came to considering retirement earlier this year.
The announcement was packaged in a sober statement issued shortly after a subdued Classics campaign, and the decision was reached without any particular wailing or gnashing of teeth. At 38 years of age, the time had come, no more and no less.
“It was the end of my contract with AG2R, and I also was not really searching for anything else. So I just decided after the Classics, which were not that great, to say, ‘It's been enough,’” Van Avermaet explained recently.
“It's just been a nice career, and I'm super happy to finish it still on a good way and being competitive. Not on the same level I was, but I can be happy with what I did. I'm happy with my decision.”
The low-key nature of the announcement felt utterly in keeping with Van Avermaet’s character.
Even in the middle of the last decade, when he was Belgium’s best Classics rider, he never stirred passions in quite the same way as Tom Boonen before him or Wout van Aert after him, and he probably preferred it that way.
Boonen’s imminent retirement in the Spring of 2017 saw the Flemish press publish regular reminders of precisely how many days he had left as a rider. Van Avermaet was probably grateful for a quieter sort of farewell.
In truth, he had been circling over the decision since at least last summer, when, for the first time since 2013, he had been deemed surplus to requirements for Tour de France selection. By then, he had gone over three years without winning a race and, during his first two seasons at AG2R Citroën, there was no escaping the sense that he was dropping steadily away in the cobbled Classics as a new generation took hold.
Last winter, perhaps for the first time since he was a neo-pro, Van Avermaet began his pre-season training aiming for respectability at his beloved Tour of Flanders rather than aiming for the win. When April came, it was clear that Pogacar, Van der Poel et al were travelling to places he could no longer reach. He announced his retirement shortly afterwards with neither recrimination nor regret.
“The Classics period was, in my opinion, just not good enough for myself, you know,” Van Avermaet said. “You train hard, and you do everything, but it doesn't really come out anymore, so then it's also better to say it's better to stop and to stop in a good way. A little bit is missing. I just have to live with it.”
The irony is that, just days after confirming his retirement, Van Avermaet went and picked up his first win in almost four years when he outsprinted Florian Vermeersch at the Boucles d’Aulne. Perhaps he had been liberated by the decision, though Van Avermaet was sceptical. In any case, the victory didn’t lead to second thoughts. If anything, it merely confirmed that his timing had been spot on. He had had just enough of a good thing.
“Not really, because afterwards I had the same feeling, that I was still good, but I couldn’t really make the difference anymore with the really good guys,” he said. “I still like cycling in general. It’s not that I don't like it. But I just feel like it's hard to get to the highest level. And if you’ve been that long on the highest level, it's hard to step down a little bit. And I also didn't want to overdo it.”
Van Avermaet’s name will forever be prefixed by the words “Olympic champion,” and he pointed to his gold medal-winning ride in Rio in 2016 as both the athletic and emotional high point of his career.
The course was deemed to be too demanding for the Classics hunters – reigning world champion Peter Sagan even opted to ride the mountain bike event instead – but Van Avermaet rode a nigh-on perfect race, cutting his cloth smartly to stay in contention on the final climb of Vista Chinesa and then dispatching Jakob Fuglsang in the sprint.
“I was a long time searching for a big win in my career, and it didn't come for free,” he said. “So having this win was for me really the achievement of my life. And I'm still enjoying it every day, just for myself, that I could reach something big like this, it's a bit crazy.”
It’s easy to forget, mind, that the greatest moment of Van Avermaet’s career came just months after the lowest point. For years, victory at the 2011 Paris-Tours notwithstanding, he had been dismissed as something of a nearly man, perpetually coming up short on the big occasion, most notoriously at the sodden Omloop Het Nieuwsblad of 2014, when he surprisingly lost a two-up sprint to Ian Stannard.
The turning point seemed to come at the 2015 Tour, when he beat Sagan to a stage win in Rodez, and the Belgian was arguably the peloton’s outstanding performer in the opening weeks of the 2016 season. He beat Sagan again to win Omloop, landed the overall title at Tirreno-Adriatico and even took fifth in a fierce bunch sprint at Milan-San Remo. He lined up for the Tour of Flanders, his Tour of Flanders, among the top favourites, but a Spring campaign of such promise was abruptly snuffed out by a heavy crash 100km from the finish that left him with a broken collarbone.
“I think this was my lowest point. It's a pity, because it’s one of those moments where you're in momentum and a career is such a short thing, so you have to make the best of it,” Van Avermaet said. “I think I missed out there, because I was at my peak in 2015, 2016 and 2017, but I actually missed Flanders and Roubaix that year. I think it could have made my career much better. I'll always say that, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. I had great legs, I’d won Omloop already, and I was really building up to something big…”
It might have broken him, but instead it seemed only to strengthen his resolve. Van Avermaet would win his second Tour stage that year and he spent three days in the maillot jaune before claiming the Olympic title and the Grand Prix de Montréal.
‘Golden Greg,’ as he was now inevitably dubbed, had entered his imperial phase. The following Spring, he won Omloop, E3 Harelbeke, Gent-Wevelgem and Paris-Roubaix. “If you win, it’s such a nice feeling,” he said. “You start to believe more in yourself, and also other people believe more in you and that helps a lot.”
Everything – well, almost everything – fell his way. The Ronde, of course, would remain forever just out of reach, and 2017 was perhaps his clearest opportunity to triumph in Oudenaarde. Instead, he had to settle for a maddening second place. While the race will be remembered for his old rival Gilbert’s 55km solo winning effort, history might have been very different had Van Avermaet not fallen on the final ascent of the Kwaremont after Sagan’s handlebars snagged on a spectator’s jacket. On such fine margins are the Monuments decided.
“Phil was strong, what he did was incredibly strong. But if you see how close we came even with the crash, I think we would have caught him,” Van Avermaet said, smiling ruefully at the memory. So it goes.
Whatever the result, Van Avermaet’s default setting afterwards was softly spoken courtesy. In defeat, he never avoided the impromptu post-mortem that would take place in the media huddle around the BMC bus, patiently talking reporters through his race in Dutch, French and English.
“I always stayed myself, I think,” Van Avermaet said. “I realised I was just a cyclist, and I wasn’t going to change the world. At my thing, I was quite good, but I also realised that everybody has value. I tried to respect everybody and what they’re doing.”
Van Avermaet was successful from the very start of his career, winning a stage of his very first race, the Tour of Qatar. In his early years at Lotto, he would vie for leadership with Philippe Gilbert, and that tension persuaded him to move to BMC in search of greater freedom. At one point, he even wondered if his future lay in the Ardennes Classics, and he delivered a daring display at the 2011 Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
Ironically, Gilbert’s subsequent arrival at BMC would cement Van Avermaet’s preference for the cobbles, with management deciding to divide the Classics calendar between the two men rather than have them tread on one another’s toes. Van Avermaet would build his Springs around Flanders and Roubaix, while Gilbert would target the Ardennes.
In those days, the Tour of Flanders was a rather more controlled affair than it is now. The road to victory tended to run through Fabian Cancellara and Tom Boonen, and everybody else’s race seemed to be ridden in the shadow of the Big Two. At Cancellara’s zenith, in particular, the peloton seemed to spend much of the race bracing itself for his inevitable late onslaught.
Every now and then, riders spoke about trying to anticipate his offensive. Van Avermaet was one of the few to act forcefully on the impulse, attacking from distance at the 2014 Ronde. Nowadays, the other contenders would feel compelled to jump on a move like that. Back then, Van Avermaet found himself alone in front. Cancellara eventually made it across and won the four-up sprint, while Van Avermaet had to settle for second.
“Nowadays riders a little bit different, and they go earlier,” he said. “I tried to go early a few times years ago, because I felt I was stronger when the race was man against man. But nobody was joining me, or else you’d get weaker guys with you. You wouldn’t get anywhere that way, so you’d end up looking like the stupid guy.
“But these days, when a good guy goes, the other good guys follow. And after that, it's quite simple. If the good guys go and they ride together, then the rest won’t be able to follow. So I think the mentality of racing changed a little. In the Classics, if you pick the right moment and you have two good guys with you, you can go from a long way out. But I think we used to a little bit more, because the big guys were not moving back then. That was a bit of a pity.”
By the time the Classics started to be raced in Van Avermaet’s preferred manner, however, his own powers were on the wane, even if he remained consistently in the front group deep into his 30s, as the letters on his jersey changed from BMC to CCC to AG2R.
Even in 2021, when Flemish expectations were heaped on younger men like Wout van Aert and Jasper Stuyven, Van Avermaet popped up as Belgium’s best finisher in the Ronde, placing third to claim his fourth and final podium finish in the race he coveted above all others. He would never win the Tour of Flanders, of course, but he has long since made his peace with the fact. Never laying down arms at the Ronde, first against Boonen and Cancellara and then against Van der Poel et al, was a victory in itself.
“I did things that I could never dream of,” Van Avermaet said. “I was yellow jersey in the Tour – for me, that was a little bit insane – and I won the Olympics, and I had all the stuff that came after that. I worked hard for it, but everybody's working hard, so you also have to be also lucky and talented. But I gave my best every day, and when you do that, you can’t have a single regret. You should just be happy with yourself and look back on a great career.”
Van Avermaet was speaking to Cyclingnews on the evening of the Grand Prix de Québec, a month or so before his final professional race at Paris-Tours.
At that point, he was quietly adamant that he no plans to turn his attention to racing full-time on the gravel circuit, which has become such a popular halfway house for retiring riders, from Nicolas Roche to Alejandro Valverde.
Yet barely a fortnight after Paris-Tours, he found himself pinning on a number once again, competing in – and winning – a gravel triathlon in Girona. Even when a career ends with no regrets, the itch tends to remain.
“I hope to do a few gravel races next year,” he confessed. “But if you want to do good again, then you have to start training again, doing twenty hours a week again. I don't know if I'm up to that. But for sure, I’m still going to ride my bike.”
