When teams are making a plan to win a race, their tactics will be based on exploiting a physical weakness in a rider or team, not by looking at what's going on in the media. But, no matter how unusual, that's the approach EF Education-EasyPost took when scheming how to deliver Neilson Powless to the win in Dwars door Vlaanderen on Wednesday.
Going into the mid-week race, there was immense pressure on Wout van Aert to perform and fight back against the criticism levelled at him every day this week in the press in Belgium and beyond. That pressure wasn't necessarily coming from the team and wouldn't always affect the racing, but EF found a way to capitalise on it.
Finding themselves in a situation where Powless was outgunned by Visma-Lease a Bike, a lone pink jersey alongside Van Aert, Matteo Jorgenson and Tiesj Benoot, they were able to anticipate exactly what the Dutch team would do.
"We were convinced that reading the media, for the last few races or after E3, it was up to Visma to reduce the noise around Wout and the only way to do that was by winning with Wout – not with Tiesj, not with Matteo, just with Wout," EF sports director Ken Vanmarcke explained to Cyclingnews at the finish.
In a normal situation where a team has a numerical advantage in the breakaway, it would make sense to make different attacks to put the intruder on the back foot. But such was the intense focus on Van Aert, EF were able to bet on his teammates trying to stay with their leader, not attack and so wait for a sprint finish.
"That was where we put our money, sit in the wheel of Wout," Vanmarcke said.
"I think Visma had the plan to go with Wout to the finish. And that's basically a logical strategy that they have to take if they believe that Wout is ready for De Ronde. So as long as Powless stayed with Wout, we were safe."
Even with such a strong sense of what Visma would do, there were still some questions over how Powless should race, beyond just sticking to Van Aert.
Should he work with Visma in the four versus one situation, or just sit on the wheels? Powless said after the race that there was some back and forth talk with the car, but ultimately they struck the right balance.
"It was a difficult one because, in theory, you don't have to pull, because they have the majority, and you don't have to do anything. But the problem is then from the moment he stopped pulling, they started attacking him, which is a normal reaction," Vanmarcke said.
"So we understood quite fast that it was not going to help Neilson to sit in the wheel, and basically it's going to cost more energy covering moves all the time when they try to drop him or whatever or somebody tries to break away. With Wout there we could expect that that was their main guy."
Powless' win surprised everyone, including himself, but for the director in the car, once the American had stuck with the leaders through the hard parts of the race, Vanmarcke started to see the path to victory.
"At the start, no [we didn't expect that] but once they were out, and once they had done all the most important climbs or crosswind sections, we saw that Visma wanted to keep it together and do a proper lead-out for Wout, and that's what happened," he said.
"We know that Neilson is also not slow, and with the headwind, we were hoping for a perfect lead-out for Wout and then a long sprint of Wout, then we did expect that we had a small chance and we used that fully."
Missing two of their most experienced Classics riders in Kasper Asgreen and Michael Valgren, from the outside it looked like EF Education-EasyPost came into this block of racing missing some strength.
Four days out from a major goal at the Tour of Flanders, they got a huge lift at Dwars door Vlaanderen.
"There is a shift forward, it's going to give a boost, a proper boost," Vanmarcke said.
"We were very motivated, last week we got third in De Panne. It didn't work out in E3, and the sprint didn't work out in Gent-Wevelgem. And today we have one of the better riders in the race, but it needs to fall all together and that's not always the case because of chaos, but today we had the legs and it fell all together."
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