The Opening Weekend might just be the most cliché-ridden event of the international cycling calendar. Alongside the purists’ continued insistence that ‘this is where the season really starts’, there’s also the question of riders’ form and the idea that you want to be ‘good but not too good’.
But is this in danger of dying out?
“Nowadays I don’t have really the feeling that someone is peaking,” Mike Teunissen, who leads Intermarché-Circus-Wanty at the double-header of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne.
The Belgian was speaking at the recent Volta ao Algarve, at a time when Tadej Pogačar was running riot in Spain, winning on his 2023 debut at Jaén Paraiso Interior and then taking three stages and the overall title at Ruta del Sol.
Pogačar will not race Opening Weekend but will be one of the favourites for this year’s Tour of Flanders after his scintillating debut last year. Which is throwing old conventions about the Opening Weekend form book up in the air.
“I have the feeling everyone is riding fast everywhere,” Teunissen added. “I think you need to be at 99.5%, because with 99% you will be dropped.”
However, those percentages were dialled down somewhat by the majority of riders and directors Cyclingnews spoke to in the Algarve.
“You want to be good but not like 100%,” said Kasper Asgreen, a former winner of Kuurne and Flanders. “Like 98%, I would say.”
Meanwhile, his Soudal-QuickStep director Tom Steels put it at 95%, a figure which Groupama-FDJ’s Stefan Küng deemed adequate to be in with a shot of victory.
The concern that clearly still looms large in the minds of most is the length of time between the Opening Weekend and the ‘real’ goals of the main Classics period. Taking place in late February, Omloop and Kuurne don’t exactly open the Spring, with most going to Paris-Nice or Tirreno-Adriatico and then racing Milan-San Remo before they come back to the cobbles of northern Belgium. As such, E3-Saxo Bank Classic is still a month away, the Tour of Flanders more than a week after that, and Paris-Roubaix a further week away.
“It’s a long period,” Kasper Asgreen, a former winner of Kuurne and Flanders, says. “If you’re flying at Omloop, it’s a long long way to Roubaix.”
The statistic that’s most striking in this regard is that no one has ever won the Omloop and the Tour of Flanders in the same year, and the former has…
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