Very detailed summary but the overall picture gets somewhat lost.
First MVDP loses 3-4 secs on mistake in the sand and then it adds up to 15 seconds from the crash. Slowly by slowly Mathieu picks his way back (down to about 10 secs) and then Wout has his flat and quickly loses some 20 secs.
After getting a new bike Wout fights his way back and on lap 5 after the first sand he is just about to catch Mathieu, but misses out, has to run, loses a few seconds but cooks himself, misses one more time on the sand and when he gets to the top of the bridge he is 13 secs behind. He then makes a second attempt to get back and manages to close the gap down to 9 secs over the long sand stretch. And then again, just before the bridge he has to get off the bike and run with a loss of another 5 secs. After that he is gassed and is consistently slower than Mathieu. It was there and then it all happened. Surely the flat impacted negatively but he was within grasps of catching Mathieu but maybe/likely due to that previous effort he couldn't hold the technique in the sand together. Wout made his best lap when Mathieu had crashed and Mathieu did his best lap on the lap Wout flatted.
In my eyes without both the crash AND the flat the outcome would not have changed. Without the flat but still with the crash? Probably the dynamics would have changed with Mathieu chasing, being more prone to mistakes and Wout possibly more relaxed. Now the table turned and Wout had the stress and the mistakes.
Yeah... It can be analyzed to the ground and we’re still left with “we’ll never know”. Either that or the fanboys will see it the way that favors their rider. It’s an endless discussion.
Personally I feel that Mathieu was on his way back to the wheel of Wout after his first mistake in the sand before he somehow ran into that rut. In other words, without the crash and the flat we would have still seen an epic duel.
However, the crash gave Wout the chance to distance Mathieu further because he obviously had to get up and back on his bike, compose himself and had a broken saddle to boot. So all of that needs to be taken into account as well when factoring in how much seconds was gained from that crash.
In that same breath, Wout’s flat couldn’t have come at a worse time. Who knows how much energy that took that could have otherwise gone in keeping Mathieu away.
Though as already mentioned, it seems like he was already starting to close the gap. So he might have just been better on the day seeing how he rode the second part of the race.
Then of course you’d have to consider the mental aspect of the stress of being the chaser vs the confidence of being the leader and how that might have affected both riders when the roles were switched.
And so we’re back at the only real conclusion being that we will never truly know and we will all have to live with that. Mechanicals are a part of the game, as much as I despise it. Same thing happened to Mathieu in Overijse.