I'm not convinced he can finish a 270k race with a solo, no. He won the Ventoux stage solo and he won Strade Bianchi with a short-ish solo. Other than that i can't recall any victory of him ending with a solo. Furthermore, i'm slowly getting the impression that long hard monument type races might be less his cup of tea than we originally thought. He's faded one too many times to ignore it.Van Aert has plenty of options on this course, but he somehow believed it would go down to a sprint. He could go from far too, or do you think he hasn't got the engine?
But on this course, he could have perhaps gone solo in the last or penultimate lap. But i wouldn't know how he would have done that considering he was the biggest favorite and his wheel would have been marked up the wazoo. In retrospect he was never going to drop Alaphilippe here, and likely a bunch of other contenders either. Evenepoel actually had a shot at beating Alaphilippe in case he attacked from further out than the Frenchman, which indeed would never have been an option for Van Aert.