The Finger to the Sky: Wout van Aert, Roubaix, and the Win He Carried for Eight Years
- Dan Jones
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
When Wout van Aert rolled into the Roubaix Velodrome, he didn’t celebrate like a man who had just beaten the world champion in a two‑up sprint. He celebrated like someone who had finally reached the end of a road he never wanted to walk.
Before he even unclipped, he pointed his finger to the sky, a gesture he had rehearsed in his mind for eight years. A gesture for Michael Goolaerts.
Michael Goolaerts: the rider before the tragedy
Michael Goolaerts was born in Lier in 1994 and grew up in Hallaar, racing through the Belgian development system with the kind of steady, hardworking progression that marks so many future classics riders. He wasn’t a prodigy; he was a grafter, the kind of rider who earns respect inside a team long before the outside world learns his name.
He won provincial and national junior time trial titles, showing early engine and discipline.
He was part of Belgian junior teams that won national titles in team pursuit and team sprint, proving he could slot into a collective and make it stronger.
He impressed in early breakaways at races like the Tour of Flanders and Halle–Ingooigem, earning praise from riders like Tom Boonen — a sign of how seriously the Belgian cycling world took him.
By 2017 he had secured a place at Vérandas Willems–Crelan, the same team where a young Wout van Aert was beginning to test himself on the road. They weren’t just teammates; they were part of a small, tight Belgian squad punching above its weight, sharing buses, meals, ambitions, and the grind of early‑career racing.
Goolaerts was known as “Goolie” cheerful, humble, always ready to work. He wasn’t the star. He was the heartbeat.
Paris–Roubaix 2018: the day everything changed
April 8, 2018 began like a dream for two young Belgians. Michael Goolaerts was riding the biggest race of his life, a 23‑year‑old finally getting his chance on the cobbles he’d grown up idolising. Wout van Aert was there too, riding his first Roubaix, stepping into the classics world with the excitement of someone who knew this race could shape his future.
The early sectors were fast and nervous, the usual chaos of Roubaix. Dust hanging in the air. Riders fighting for position. The sound of carbon slamming against stone. Nothing unusual, nothing alarming — until the peloton hit the Briastre sector.
Somewhere in the middle of the group, Goolaerts went down. To the riders behind him, it looked like a crash. A slip. A wheel touching a wheel. The kind of thing that happens a hundred times in this race. But the team car sensed something different almost immediately. The radio chatter changed tone. The updates stopped being updates. A mechanic later said it felt like “the air went out of the car.”
On the stones, paramedics were already working on him. CPR on the roadside. A helicopter landing in a nearby field. But none of that filtered through to the riders still racing. Roubaix doesn’t pause. The race kept rolling toward the velodrome, and the Vérandas Willems–Crelan riders kept riding with a growing sense that something was wrong, without knowing what.
Wout finished 13th that day a remarkable result for a first‑timer, but he crossed the line with the expression of someone who already understood the result didn’t matter. He rolled to a stop, breathing hard, looking for teammates, looking for answers. The team gathered around phones and staff members with tight faces. No one spoke at first. No one needed to.
The official announcement didn’t come until later that evening, hours after the podium, hours after the crowds had gone home. Michael had died in hospital in Lille. The autopsy would later confirm he had suffered cardiac arrest before falling from his bike, a truth that didn’t bring clarity or comfort, it only sharpened the sense of how brutally fast everything had changed.
For Wout, the moment the news reached him became a permanent marker. His first Roubaix, the race he had dreamed about, the race he hoped would define him — was suddenly fused to grief. He would later say, “2018 was the first time I did this race and it was immediately a sad day. Losing a teammate in a race is something cruel.” In that instant, Roubaix stopped being just a race. It became a place he would carry with him for the rest of his career.
The days after Roubaix: a team grieving in motion
The shock of Michael Goolaerts’ death didn’t fade when the sun rose the next morning. It hung over the Vérandas Willems–Crelan team like a physical weight. Riders woke up with swollen eyes. Staff moved through hotel corridors in silence. Breakfast was quiet, the kind of quiet where every clink of a spoon feels too loud.
And yet, the sport didn’t stop. Cycling never does. Only three days after Roubaix, the team lined up at Brabantse Pijl. It was the last place any of them wanted to be, but they believed showing up mattered. They wore black armbands. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the signing podium, not as a squad chasing results but as a group trying to hold each other upright.
Spectators sensed it immediately. The usual pre‑race buzz softened around them. Journalists approached gently, asking fewer questions, speaking in lowered voices. Riders signed autographs with trembling hands. Some avoided eye contact altogether.
Inside the team car, the mood was even heavier. Mechanics worked slowly, deliberately, as if rushing would break something fragile. Soigneurs moved between riders with quiet touches on shoulders. The directors spoke softly, reminding everyone that simply finishing the race would be enough.
They weren’t racing for a result. They were racing because stopping would have felt like abandoning him.
How the team carried Michael in the days that followed
The response inside the team was intimate and instinctive. They visited Michael’s parents together. They attended the funeral as a united block, riders, soigneurs, mechanics, directors filling pews with team jackets and bowed heads. They created a small memorial space in the service course, a place where his presence could remain part of the daily rhythm. His locker stayed untouched for weeks.
They spoke about him constantly, not as a tragedy but as a teammate they loved. When the cobbled sector where he collapsed was renamed Secteur Pavé Michael Goolaerts the following year, it felt like the sport acknowledging what the team already knew: Michael’s story was now part of Roubaix’s history.
The long road back: Roubaix from 2019 to 2025
The years after 2018 became a kind of pilgrimage for Wout van Aert. Every spring he returned to the cobbles carrying the memory of his first Roubaix, trying to turn something painful into something purposeful. But Roubaix is a race that rarely gives you what you want, and for Wout it became a place that tested him in ways no other race could.
In 2019 he arrived stronger, wiser, and determined to prove he belonged among the favourites. For a while it looked like he did. He was in the front groups, riding with the confidence of someone who had shed the wide‑eyed rookie skin. Then the race reminded him who was in charge. A puncture at the wrong moment, a chase that burned too many matches, and suddenly he was out of contention. It wasn’t heartbreak, not yet, but it was the first sign that Roubaix wasn’t going to let him rewrite the story easily.
The next few years only deepened that feeling. In 2021, the mud edition, he looked like a man built for the chaos. He surfed the slick cobbles with the ease of a cyclocross world champion, and for a moment Belgium believed the curse might lift. But Roubaix has a way of turning promise into punishment. He faded in the final hour, legs empty, face streaked with mud and frustration. It was the kind of day that becomes mythic for the winner and haunting for everyone else.
In 2022 he returned with the form of his life, but the race unravelled around him. Crashes, mechanicals, the usual Roubaix cruelty. He kept fighting, kept clawing back positions, but the race never opened for him. It was as if the cobbles were holding him at arm’s length, refusing to let him step into the story he was trying to write.
By 2023 and 2024, the pattern had become familiar. He would arrive as a favourite, he would animate the race, he would look like the strongest man on the road at times, and then something would happen. A puncture. A crash. A split in the group at the worst possible moment. The kind of things that happen to everyone in Roubaix, but seemed to happen to him with a particular sting. Each edition added another layer to the weight he carried. Each near miss made the vow he held inside him feel both closer and further away.
2025 was perhaps the cruelest of all. He came in with perfect preparation, a team built around him, and a sense that this might finally be the year. He rode with authority, floating over the cobbles, marking every move that mattered. But in the final hour, when the race tilted toward its decisive moment, he was caught behind a crash he couldn’t avoid. He hit the deck, got up, chased with everything he had, but the front of the race was gone. He finished battered, furious, and hollow. It was the kind of day that makes riders question whether Roubaix is a race you win or a race that chooses you.
Through all of it, the memory of 2018 never left him. Every recon passed the sector that now carried Michael’s name. Every return to the velodrome brought back the silence of that first finish. Every edition felt like another attempt to close a chapter that refused to end. Roubaix had become a scar, but also a compass. It kept pulling him back, year after year, asking him to try again.
The weight Wout carried into 2026
By the time Wout van Aert arrived at the start of Paris–Roubaix in 2026, the race had become something far larger than a line on his calendar. It had grown into a scar he carried with him, a place where memory and ambition were permanently intertwined. He was twenty‑three when it happened, still learning who he was on the road, still adjusting to the pressure of being Belgium’s next great hope. Roubaix was supposed to be the beginning of his classics story. Instead, it became the place where he lost a teammate he had travelled with, joked with, and eaten breakfast with that same morning. That kind of moment doesn’t fade. It settles into the bones.
Every year he returned, the memory returned with him. Every recon passed the sector that now carried Michael’s name. Every edition echoed the first one, the one that ended not in celebration but in silence. The race fused itself to him in a way he never chose, and in a way he could never shake.
Through all those years, he stayed close with the Goolaerts family. He messaged them. He visited them. He kept the connection alive because letting it fade felt impossible. Michael’s father, Staf, once said, “I still send a message to those guys regularly. To Wout too. He always replies within a few minutes.” It was a simple line, but it revealed how deeply Wout carried the loss, and how present Michael remained in his life long after the headlines moved on.
Somewhere along that long road back to Roubaix, a quiet vow formed. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t spoken aloud. It was something he carried privately, year after year, through punctures, crashes, near misses, and heartbreak. When he finally won in 2026, he allowed himself to say it plainly: “Ever since then, it was my goal to win this race and point my finger to the sky, to Michael.” It wasn’t superstition. It wasn’t symbolism. It was grief that had never fully settled, shaped into purpose.
Michael’s parents, Staf and Marianne, lived their own version of that grief. Staf couldn’t watch races anymore. “It hurts too much. Especially because these were his races.” But on the day Wout finally won, he happened to hear the radio commentary as he pulled into his driveway. “I heard Wout had a chance of winning. I stayed in the car and listened. The tears were rolling down my cheeks.” Marianne watched the finish live. She saw Wout point to the sky. She saw the emotion break over him. She saw the promise kept.
Later, they said something that captured the entire arc of the story, from 2018 to that moment in the velodrome: “We’re not superstitious, but we think our Michael rode with Wout today.”
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