'The true king of the Belgians' - Van Aert's Paris-Roubaix win sparks outpouring back home

A week ago on Antwerp’s Grote Markt, even amid all the enthusiasm for Remco Evenepoel’s Tour of Flanders debut, the biggest cheers before the start were for Wout van Aert. It was no surprise, then, that Van Aert’s tumultuous victory at Paris-Roubaix prompted an outpouring of elation in his native Belgium.

That was immediately evident on Sunday afternoon, when video footage emerged of KV Mechelen fans erupting as they watched Van Aert outsprint Tadej Pogačar on the big screen at the Achter de Kazerne stadium.

Reports on Van Aert’s victory led news bulletins in Belgium on Sunday evening, bumping geopolitics and space travel from top spot, and his face adorned the front of the country’s newspapers on Monday morning.

Het Nieuwsblad captured the prevailing mood by running a picture of Van Aert embracing on his family on the front page with the headline: “He’s not the only one in tears.” The sports section opted for a shot of Van Aert crossing the line, accompanied by a one-word title: “Finally.”

For Het Laatste Nieuws, it was “the win of his life,” while La Dernière Heure went with a nod to Van Aert’s resilience in Sunday’s race and beyond: “Unpuncturable!”

Writing in Het Nieuwsblad, the former Lotto manager Marc Sergeant hailed the Roubaix triumph as “the win that frees Wout van Aert from all his demons.” The Visma | Lease a Bike rider’s lone previous Monument win had come at the pandemic-delayed Milan-Sanremo of 2020, and his old rival Mathieu van der Poel had raced ahead of him in the meantime, racking up eight Monument wins. 

Sunday, however, belonged only to Van Aert. Sergeant hailed his strength in distancing Mads Pedersen and his strategy in refusing Pogačar’s entreaties to take longer turns on the uphill sectors. “He was cool-headed enough not to fall into Pogačar’s trap,” Sergeant wrote. “Van Aert really did everything right.”

Elsewhere in Het Nieuwsblad, there was praise for Van Aert’s poignant dedication of his win to the late Michael Goolaerts, who died of cardiac arrest during Paris-Roubaix in 2018. 

“It is to Van Aert’s credit that, upon winning the biggest race of his career, he immediately thought of his deceased teammate,” said the newspaper, which also carried an interview with Goolaerts’ father. “I couldn’t hold back the tears,” Staf Goolaerts said. “It’s beautiful that Flanders still knows who our Michael was.”

Van Aert’s friend and occasional training partner Jan Bakelants is a columnist at Het Laatste Nieuws, and he had witnessed firsthand his various injury setbacks over the past three years. 

“I have seen with my own eyes how he has pulled himself together time and time again,” wrote Bakelants, who revealed how Van der Poel’s run of success had exacerbated despair after his crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen in 2024. “When you see your main rival, with whom you fought countless confrontations in your youth, winning one race after another that same spring, it naturally doesn’t feel good.”

Like Sergeant, he couched the Paris-Roubaix victory as a liberation, though he wondered if the turning point in Van Aert’s career hadn’t already arrived last summer when he dropped Pogačar to win the final stage of the Tour de France.

“He sometimes gave me the feeling that he had let go a bit, that he had resigned himself to the fact that he no longer reached the level of men like Pogačar and Van der Poel,” Bakelants wrote. “But that victory gave him the feeling that he can still do it and motivated him to give it his all one more time this Spring.”

Van Aert’s victory was feted as heartily in Wallonia as it was in his native Flanders, with La Dernière Heure comparing the collective national outpouring to the reaction to the Belgian football team’s victory over Brazil in the 2018 World Cup. 

In an editorial headlined “Wooooouuuuuuut van Aert, the true king of the Belgians,” the newspaper noted that “never before has a victory by one of our compatriots at Paris–Roubaix been so universally acclaimed.”

That acclaim extended beyond the border to France, where Van Aert graced the front page of L’Équipe on Monday morning under the headline “A great.” Inside, the newspaper declared that Van Aert had righted a longstanding wrong by failing adding his name the roll of honour in Roubaix.

“Euphoria reigned, not because Tadej Pogačar had lost – not because, for once, the expected outcome of a race with the world champion had been upset – but because Wout Van Aert had won,” L’Équipe said. “A shared moment, a general sense of peace, an anomaly rectified.”