Cancellara's Classics Column: Tadej Pogacar turns Tour of Flanders into watts-per-kilo game

I wrote before the Tour of Flanders that if Pogacar could drop Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert then it would be something huge. And he did it. What he achieved today, the way he rode, will go down in history.

For Tadej, the harder it gets, the easier it gets. What I mean by that is, when it's a hard race, the strength of the strongest rider will show, and the others will blow earlier. The better you are, the less you have to worry. If you are tired, the others are more tired. Mentally, you need to be strong, but the harder it is for everyone, the easier it gets for you.

This Tour of Flanders was just hard all the time. It was a crazy race, right from the start - even before the start, with the terrible weather in the last days. Then you do the first 100km in two hours and everyone is on the limit when they should be letting a breakaway go.

The wind was stronger than expected and that had an influence. It looked so nervous in the bunch, and the first part of the race was just a crash festival. The first hours were just so intense, and this definitely has an impact later on, especially when you're racing for 274km - longer than usual for a Tour of Flanders.

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The second thing is that once the race is already hard, Tadej makes it harder by accelerating from the bottom to the top of every key climb. This is a Tour de France winner and he needs to use every single inch of uphill to his advantage, to turn it into a watts-per-kilo game as much as possible. The Oude Kwaremont is the prime example - the longest climb in the race. They did it three times and there was barely a cobblestone on which he wasn't attacking.

I definitely expected Tadej to go full gas from the bottom to the top to drop everybody on the last lap, but I didn't expect him to go straight away on the second time up. Given the situation of the race, he sort of had to.

That dangerous big group had gone away and gained three minutes. I thought 'surely it's not over'. I actually said out loud, 'no, it cannot be over'. Then UAE moved up and went full gas on the Kwaremont, the race explodes, and Tadej is gone. When Laporte joined him, the race looked super interesting - he was on the front foot but it was a gamble.

In the end, it comes back and Tadej still does the forcing on Koppenberg, Wout drops on Kruisberg, Mathieu drops on Kwaremont, and it's over. What more can you say? There is simply no argument that the strongest guy won the race. He is the deserving winner of the Tour of Flanders.

Wout van Aert was the most disappointing of the so-called 'Big Three'. In my opinion, the best team today in how they rode were Jumbo-Visma. The only thing was that in the end, Wout could not finish it off. Putting Nathan Van Hooydonck up the road and not working was a nice move, then sending Christophe Laporte up to Tadej after the first Kwaremont was even better. At that point in the race, Mathieu was forced into defence mode.

But I don't know what went wrong. I saw Wout riding a lot at the back, even at the start. Riding at the back with that wind and that craziness, I don't know if this was a good idea. Maybe it's the wrong karma. To win a bike race, you need to have the legs but I also believe in karma, I believe in searching your luck in the front.

For Wout, the wait goes on, but I still believe he will win the Tour of Flanders. Next year he will be 29 - the same age that I won it for the first time.

As for Mathieu, I don't know how much he was playing today. There were a couple of times when he was a bit dropped - once when he had a chain problem on the Taaienberg and another time when he didn't look as strong as he turned out to be when he dropped Wout on the Kruisberg. The first time up the Kwaremont, or even on the Koppenberg, I don't know if was it was playing - to make people wonder if he's not feeling good - or if it was on purpose. In the end, the attack he did on Kruisberg was quite impressive. I think he surprised everyone there, for sure. Wout was certainly caught off guard and so was Tadej. With the legs he had, he would not have had to close any gap if he had been expecting that acceleration for Mathieu.

Perhaps Mathieu ultimately paid for this effort on the Kwaremont, but then again, he probably needed to do it, because they needed to catch those guys out in front. I thought he rode a good race but in the end, he was beaten by a better rider on the day.

As for the rest, I was curious to see who would go in the early moves. Well, it turns out a lot of them. Realistically, anticipation was the only way to stand a chance out there, and lots of riders set out with the same battle plan. The guys in that front group emptied themselves and can all walk away with their heads held high. People questioned the possibility of beating the Big Three, but we were not so far away from that.

A special mention for Mads Pedersen. The way he rode, the guy deserved to be on the podium because he dared and he tried. Of course, he paid for that effort, but he was the guy who took the risk, so it's a deserving guy up there on the podium with Tadej and Mathieu.

A footnote, that was quite a special move from DSM, going so slow on the Kortekeer and then sprinting. Nice try, but in the end I saw no DSM at all in the front.