Belgium bags MXoN gold as Team GB finishes seventh!
By Team TMX on 5th Oct 26
Thirteen years after its last victory, the country’s youngest-ever trio of Lucas and Sacha Coenen and Liam Everts delivered the Chamberlain Trophy at Ernée – and they did it without winning a single race.
Instead, Belgium’s strength was consistency. Lucas went 3-5, Everts 4-4 and Sacha 12-7, with the latter’s opening-race result discarded under the five-from-six scoring system. That gave Belgium 23 points, just three clear of Spain on 26, with the Netherlands third on 34.
For Everts, the victory had an extra layer of history.
His grandfather Harry won the Nations for Belgium in 1976 and 1979, while dad Stefan was part of five victorious Belgian teams between 1995 and 2004. Now Liam has added his name to the family roll of honour, 50 years after Harry’s first success.
But if Belgium provided the fairy-tale team result, Jeffrey Herlings provided the individual fireworks. The Dutchman dominated Race Two – the MX2/Open encounter – by more than 35 seconds from Andrea Adamo before doing it all over again in Race Three, this time coming through from a first-lap mistake to hunt down Jorge Prado and take the chequered flag by 12 seconds.
Those two wins put Herlings at the top of the Open classification and helped the Netherlands to third overall.
Race One belonged to home hero Romain Febvre, who took the MXGP/MX2 moto ahead of Spain’s Jorge Prado and Lucas Coenen. Prado then finished second again in Race Three to top the individual MXGP classification, while newly crowned MX2 World Champion Guillem Farres went 4-5 to take the MX2 honours in his final outing on a 250.
Spain’s second place was historic in its own right – the nation’s first-ever Motocross of Nations podium.
France, meanwhile, endured a miserable home event. Febvre’s Race One victory was the highlight, but crashes and problems for the three-man squad put the home team out of contention before the final reckoning.
And Great Britain finished seventh overall on 82 points, with Ben Watson going 10-9 in the Open class, Taylor Hammal 16-30 in MXGP and Ben Mustoe 23-24 in MX2.
At the sharp end, though, this was Belgium’s day.
The country’s 16th Nations victory moves it level with Great Britain in second place on the all-time winners list – and with the Coenen twins still only 19, and Everts 23, this could be the start of something rather than the end of a wait.
