'Failure is not an option' were the words plastered across the sports section of Nieuwsblad on Friday morning, above an image of Wout van Aert. The Visma-Lease a Bike rider's face was on the cover, too, as a whole nation waited to see how the Belgian would fare in the first big Classics test at E3 Saxo Classic.
With Van Aert as the protagonist and Matteo Jorgenson as a very worthy co-leader, failure really was not an option, but that's how Visma-Lease a Bike's race panned out as their riders rolled in, cold and wet, to the finish in Harelbeke. Fifteenth for Van Aert, a slightly more respectable ninth for Jorgenson.
"My feeling was OK. I think I just invested a lot too early and paid for it in the end pretty clearly," Jorgenson said at the finish, taking little pride in his top-10 finish. "I felt pretty good, but it just wasn't a good race."
It certainly wasn't. Though Visma were ominously absent when Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) and Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) put in what would be the race-winning attack, the Dutch squad's problems started well before that.
An early crash saw almost the whole Visma team held up, and the peloton split in two, with Van Aert forming part of a big group that would eventually chase back to the rest of the peloton.
Jorgenson, it transpired, was also caught behind the crash, but rather than wait for the second peloton to reform and chase back on as a group, the ambitious American set off with a small group to try and bridge back to the main group. Ambitious, but ultimately costly.
"It definitely wasn't a good situation," Jorgenson explained at the finish.
"I think before the cameras came on, I had invested a lot to get back to the first group. I was actually behind the crash. I wasn't involved in it, and I was able to get off my bike and walk around it and get back on, and I found myself in a group of five, and we had to invest a lot to get back to the first group.
"This was with like 200 kilometres to go, so there I invested. It was OK once I was back in the front, and the race just kept coming back and splitting again."
Eventually, the second group – which also contained Van der Poel, Van Aert and Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) – rejoined the bunch, but when the racing kicked off, the fatigue among the Visma riders proved costly, being out of position on the crucial Taaienberg.
"I missed the beat on Taaienberg, I was a bit too far back there," Van Aert told VTM after the race. "I was just behind the split, around position twenty, so from there it was racing backwards."
Van Aert's director, Arthur Van Dongen, was somewhat less favourable about the Belgian's ride, putting it down to more than just positioning, saying Van Aert and teammate Tiesj Benoot both "gave everything, but just came up short".
"I think he's just short of following the strongest on the Taaienberg. Then you're not competing for the podium," Van Dongen told the Dutch media. "They rode away from there, and we didn't see them again."
Jorgenson was slightly better placed on the all-important climb and ended up in the key chasing group but remained disappointed in the team's performance.
"I think we can be honest – we just weren't well enough positioned," he said.
"It's just something we need to work on. We were a little bit too far back again and had to invest a lot of myself to try to make it back to the three in front and just couldn't close the gap. I found myself in a smaller group again and we kind of had a chasse patate at the end. I used a lot of energy."
Asked to explain why Visma weren't up to scratch on Friday, the American didn't offer excuses.
"We weren't there, and that's as simple as that," he said. "We just didn't make it. You can't always control the race like you want to, so we have things to learn. But this was a mistake."
The crash may mean Van Aert is marginally spared from the accusations of failure, as he potentially didn't get to demonstrate his full ability. However, the fact is that Visma will go to bed on Friday night with lessons to learn and only a short eight days to right some wrongs before the big event next Sunday.
