After his 2nd spot at Roubaix last year i assumed he'd have had his own topic but it appears not. Yesterday the first episode of this season's ''Containercup'' was aired featuring Florian Vermeersch and Mauri Vansevenant. The concept has been explained in the past in a few other topics, but the Containercup was a TV show concept that was thought up during the first lockdown in 2020, where athletes competed at 7 trials in a shipping container (running mill, monkeybars, rowing machine, golf sim, shooting, bench press, spinning bike).
The spinning bike obviously doesn't favor smaller / lighter / aero athletes considering it's just about how much watts you can push. So back in 2020, Van Aert set the record on the spinning bike, beating Mathieu van der Poel by 10 seconds. Over the past 2 years some others came close to beating Van der Poel's time, some actually did beat it, but nobody could match Van Aert's time (while at the time he was still not 100% recovered from his injury back then).
Until yesterday's episode. Florian Vermeersch beat Van Aert's time by 0.5 second. Again, it should be noted that Vermeersch is taller as well as heavier than Van Aert and the machine is simply measuring raw watts, but still. I didn't expect it.
On the wikipage you can check all times of participating athletes:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Container_Cup
Here is the episode with Van Aert and Van der Poel of 2020: It's possible you'll need a VPN, i don't know:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmNtbyjanio