On the right side, a smile in front of the media, a few seconds after finishing the 253 kilometers from Ghent-Wevelgem. On the other hand, once in the bus of his Groupama – FDJ team, Laurence Pithie, 21 years old and 26th, grimaced a little more because, “like in Kuurne (43rd), he’s not missing much, underlined its sports director, Frédéric Guesdon. He was a little upset because he missed something big.” As during the semi-classic at the end of February, where he worked alongside Wout van Aert, Tim Wellens and Oier Lazkano, on Sunday he was in “good company with a former world champion (Pedersen 2019) and a world champion (Van der Poel 2023),” he smiled, right side up.
Here again, the New Zealander clung to their coattails, he climbed with them the first two passages of the Kemmel but the third, the hardest on the side of the ossuaries, was fatal to him and, at the top, at the level of the A monument paying tribute to the French units engaged in the fighting in the Monts de Flandre in 1918, it had already spent eight seconds: “I no longer had any legs. But I’m still young and I’m not very far from them anymore. »
Wearing the leader’s jersey for one day in Paris-Nice at the beginning of March, winner of the Cadel Evans at the end of January, the boy with the child’s face (he is 21 years old) also has four top 10s on the Tour Down Under, three in Paris – Nice and during the Primavera, he achieved a nice 15th place. Pithie therefore turns around and Guesdon is not surprised by his progress: “He is a young person who is moving up in the racing levels, last year it was the Coupe de France, this year it is the World Tour. » He is learning but he knows that the step is still a little high in the face of such competition: “At Kuurne, I worked with the other guys who let me go. There, I tried to maneuver a little differently but I was still let go. »