Jasper Philipsen won in Paris, at the Tour de France, in 2022. A caption like that alone might be enough to make an athlete memorable, because whoever wins at the Tour enters history, and because winning at the Tour, in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées, for anyone – and perhaps above all for a sprinter – is the engagement dreamed of for a lifetime, the evening itself; and lately Paris is reached in the evening, which makes it all the more impossible to miss, awaited in a romantic and melancholy mood. But Jasper Philipsen, born in 1998, a Belgian from Mol, has won no fewer than eleven stages at the Tour de France: the most recent just a few days ago, after he and the team had got everything wrong for days, the first in that very year at Carcassonne. And that is not all: he has six victories at the Vuelta, a Milan–San Remo, a Gent–Wevelgem, a Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne and the points classification of the Grande Boucle to his name. In Mol, his home town, the rider who had always inspired him, Tom Boonen, had also been born, eighteen years earlier, in 1980. They did not share a career, but Jasper still managed to train a few times with Boonen when he was little more than a boy, and he remembers those rides to this day. Philipsen was not only born in the same town as Boonen but, in cycling terms, resembles him as well. We are talking about sprinting speed, about the skill of moving when the bunch kicks and loses its head in the chaos of a mass finish after stages as flat as a billiard table, but also about mastery on the cobbles, when cycling, in spring, arrives at the Hell of the North. Boonen won Roubaix four times; Philipsen has not yet managed it, but he came close in both 2023 and 2024, finishing second each time behind Mathieu van der Poel, his team-mate and the finest carriage in his train at Alpecin–Deceuninck.
We have all seen the scene more than once and been left admiring it: the power of van der Poel clearing the way for the pure speed of Philipsen who, making use of that slipstream, seems even stronger, more skilful, more gifted, almost impossible to overtake. Jasper has said that at times this partnership also caused him doubts, as though he could not win without van der Poel, as though his presence were necessary for victory and on his own he were worth less. It seems he overcame that fear precisely thanks to the victories in which van der Poel was not there and to those in which he managed to prove equal to such an imposing leader. From his first important successes, he has always spoken of how important it was for him to preserve that light, free approach which allows a rider to face the risks of a complex discipline such as sprinting without being paralysed by fear. He succeeded, at least until the start of this Tour, despite periods that were more or less positive. Then, on the twenty-second of July this year, in Voiron, he found victory again and admitted that he had been close to stopping believing, and yet had been waiting for nothing but that day, had ridden only for that day which never seemed to come, despite all the preparation work. Mathieu van der Poel said something similar. So yes, van der Poel and Philipsen are stronger together, they complement one another athletically in that puzzle which is the sprint and among the cobbles of the Classics; this happens precisely because of the singular qualities of both men, because of the talent of both men. The road Boonen once travelled is the road Philipsen is travelling now, and he is doing so with conviction, now that, as a professional cyclist, Mol is often far away.