Mathieu van der Poel won a third successive E3 Saxo Classic after a thrilling finish in which it looked like the Dutchman would be caught.
The Alpecin-Premier Tech rider escaped with 45km to go on Friday, and might have cruised to the finish, but a strong group of four were metres away from him in the finale.
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How it happened
After leaving Harelbeke, the breakaway took a long time to be fully established, with Bastien Tronchon (Groupama-FDJ), Nickolas Zukowsky (Pinarello Q36.5), Michiel Lambrecht (Flanders-Baloise), Stan Dewulf (Decathlon CMA CGM), Luke Durbridge (Jayco-AlUla) and Sven Erik Bystrøm (Uno-X Mobility) heading up the road.
These six built an advantage of over three minutes over the peloton, although for a long time there was a second group between the pair, which was Henri-François Renard-Haquin (Picnic PostNL), Sean Flynn (Picnic PostNL) and Vojtěch Kmínek (Burgos Burpellet BH). However, the trio never looked like catching those up the road.
The first big move came at 94km to go, on the Karnemelkbeekstraat, when a group of seven, including Timo Kielich (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Daan Hoole (Decathlon CMA CGM). They soon caught Renard-Haquin, Flynn and Kmínek, and passed them.
On the Taaienberg, with around 70km to go, Tim Van Dijke (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe) attacked, followed by Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech), the defending champion.
At this point, there were still two groups on the road in front of the pair, before Van der Poel went solo with around 45km to go
Few would be forgiven for thinking that this was race over, with the rider who won the last two editions out in front, but a group including DeWulf, Per Strand Hagenes (Visma-Lease a Bike), Florian Vermeersch (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) and Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility) started to reel the former world champion in. A time gap which was over a minute was reduced to 30 seconds with under 15km to go, and then close to 10 seconds with under 5km to go.
However, despite practically being on Van der Poel’s wheel just under the kilometre to go banner, the Dutchman surged again, as the group behind started to play games over who would do the final pull to catch him.
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