Is It a BCS Emergency Or... an FCS one?

Young guns come out blazing in Spain and UAE

One of our longer running bits here is the BCS Alert — a signal the blasts across the Podium Cafe Landscape alerting any and all members that a Belgian Climbing Sensation has been sighted. It’s very exciting! And certainly, it doesn’t happen enough, if you ask any Belgian.

That is what made Sunday’s rampage by Lotto-DSTNY’s Lennert Van Eetvelt such a notable event. The 22-year-old from Binkom, near Leuven, escaped from the peloton on the Jebel Hafeet, the final event of the UAE Tour, with enough of a gap to take the stage and the general classification, by two seconds over Decathlon-AG2R’s Ben O’Connor. It was powerful stuff:

Those are big numbers! So is Van Eetvelt going to WIN THE TOUR DE FRANCE?!?! Probably not now, and not ever. But he might be kind of awesome regardless. The case for Van Eetvelt being a future star is that he’s 22, and if he hasn’t been talked about a lot before today, well, not every future star has to emerge at 19, do they? Physiologically and psychologically, a 22-year-old male is still evolving, and the pace at which young people grow doesn’t mean that much about where they will end up. I can’t find much about him on the internet right now beyond the avalanche of UAE Tour stories (sigh) but he said in interviews yesterday that he’s lived in the shadow of Remco Evenepoel — Old Man Remco, now 24 — and his palmares before turning pro were exciting but not blow-you-away stuff.

There is one result, though, that now looks incredibly interesting: the U23 Giro d’Italia from 2022. It was won by Leo Hayter, who is now with INEOS and hasn’t broken through at the top level yet (and also only 22), followed by our man Van Eetvelt at 2:12, followed by FDJ’s Lenny Martinez at 4:55. Hayter put five minutes into the field over the course of the course of two stages, the second and third, which he won, the latter being a multiple-mountain event including the back side of the Mortirolo. The kid grew wings that day I guess. But Van Eetvelt finished third, just behind Romain Gregoire and 49” up on Martinez.

Van Eetvelt then won the sixth stage to Colle Fauniera, a flat approach to a single climb that is a dead ringer for the Jebel Hafeet stage. He put 1:16 into Martinez and close to three minutes on Hayter, who still cruised home for the GC win. This was a strong field and Van Eetvelt was clearly the second-best that week.

[Side note: what was SO IMPORTANT that I couldn’t make time to watch the 2022 U23 Giro d’Italia?!? Regrets, I have a few...]

Photo by Tim de Waele/Getty Images

So for now we can safely say that Van Eetvelt has a clear track record of monster efforts on one-climb MTF stages, as further buttressed by the numbers from yesterday’s win. We don’t have a ton of evidence that he can put in multiple monster efforts on a mountainous stage, but Hayter is the only rider who outclassed him in the Queen Stage that year, possibly for reasons that would tell us some other story (was Hayter in an early break? info is scant).

At the top level, if you hung in for the entire Vuelta a España last year — as many American fans certainly did — you caught glimpses of Van Eetvelt putting in very respectable efforts across multiple climbs, albeit in breakaways that were marked by the GC contenders’ indifference. Both notable high finishes, stages 14 and 20, featured escapes by Evenepoel, who had already fallen out of contention and was free to chase stages. On stage 14, LVE finished third, 6:33 back of Remco and 5’ behind Romain Bardet, another veteran star of the mountains. In stage 20 Van Eetvelt made it to the line with the leaders, with Wout Poels taking the win ahead of Remco and Pelayo Sanchez, with LVE fourth.

This is a kid who is coming on fast, and while 2024 might not be a huge year for him, we should enjoy watching him grow into a real contender. More importantly, Lotto DSTNY should enjoy watching him score points, which they badly need to stay relevant and in business. The team got relegated after last year to ProTeam status, but with enough points to ensure wild card invites to the World Tour events, while they wait out the 2023-25 cycle and hopefully rejoin the top division. The team has operated in Quick Step’s shadow more years than not, but with Arnaud De Lie and the hopefully-recovering Florian Vermeersch on board, and other young talents like Alec Segaert, a top one-day aspirant, the team’s next core is coming together.

Photo by Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

But What About the FCS?

As exciting as a BCS is to our readers, and to the larger world of cycling fanhood, an FCS — French Climbing Sensation — might be even more meaningful. France and Belgium have long been at the heart of the sport, and while we have had a few French contenders in recent years, it’s not enough to satisfy the thirst of the nation that hosts the Tour de France.

Mentioned above is this Lenny Martinez kid... heard of him? 327 FSA Directeur Sportif owners have, and put him on their squad for this year, banking on the not-yet-21-year-old French rider for FDJ has even bigger things ahead for him than Lennert. [Is this the Lennaissance? I’ll stop now.]

Martinez is already hard at work paying off his five-point cost. He didn’t match Van Eetvelt’s winning ways on the scoreboard, but his second place this past weekend at O Gran Camiño might have been more impressive, coming within 1:55 of no less than double-defending Tour winner Jonas Vingegaard. Sure, he had 58 seconds in the bank after the opening TT and then watched Vingo win the remaining three stages, but on the final queen stage, Martinez was the only rider who can say he kept the Dane in sight, conceding a mere 16 seconds. Notable names who finished behind this 20-year-old kid include Bernal, Uijtdebroeks, Carthy and Carapaz. The scoreboard favors Van Eetvelt for now, but in cycling things are rarely so black-and-white.

Even setting aside Martinez being two years younger (which normally we would absolutely NOT set aside), he’s arguably been the better rider at every step. Last year he out-scored Van Eetvelt by a good 15% or so, depending on whose points you prefer, and his win at the CIC-Mont Ventoux classic was far more telling than the Belgian’s stage victory at the Sibiu Tour. There, Martinez pipped Michael Woods, Simon Carr and Christián Rodríguez at the majestic Provençal summit. [The Mont Ventoux classic is taking a year off because the Olympic torch has to pass through on the day it would otherwise have been held.]

Photo by Laurent Coust/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The Two Lenns did, interestingly, go head to head at the Mercan Tour, and rode stride-for-stride just behind escapees Carapaz and Felix Gall, with Van Eetvelt easily taking the third podium spot. So while Martinez probably had the better year, it’s not clear that one was truly superior to the other. And going back further in time is pointless; Van Eetvelt rode mostly U23 races the last couple years while Martinez was cleaning up in lower ranked events as a teenager on the move.

The impressive performances of two young riders on parallel tracks, separated by two years of aging but little else, is a great way to start the season. It’s still February and we all need to keep taking our chill pills a little bit longer, but notice has been served by the respective FDJ and Lotto DSTNY camps that these guys are coming up, fast.