Dylan Groenewegen and Maarten Wynants fought until the last kilometres of a difficult edition of Le Samyn today. The Team LottoNL-Jumbo riders made the leading 13-man group, but could not hold back eventual winner Niki Terpstra (Etixx-Quick Step). Groenewegen took sixth place and Wynants ninth.

They covered 16 cobblestone sections over the 200 kilometres of Le Samyn, but the wind and the rain proved to be their biggest rival. Those circumstances made the Belgian one-day race a real knock-out fight. “I really enjoyed this race,” sports director Merijn Zeeman. “It was a difficult one for the riders, but a real advertisement for the sport. When we came to the finishing laps, only 40 riders were still competing. It became a knock-out fight. That makes it impossible to make a race plan. 

“A group of 13 riders escaped, but they didn’t really break away. They just distanced the others. Maarten put in everything he had to give Dylan the chance to sprint for the victory, but even in the final, it was all about positioning in the wind. The best riders escaped on the cobblestones and that was it.”

Zeeman said that Groenewegen must be proud of the performance he delivered in Le Samyn. “A sixth place doesn’t mean much to me, but that I was able to show off in a race like this is a good thing as a sprinter,” Groenewegen added. “It was a beautiful race. It was heavy and painful. Everyone ends up in the place he deserves, and Terpstra was the best today. I have to be satisfied, we fought for it, tried to react to every attack and that was everything we could do.”