Opening Weekend provided confirmation of some things that we might already have guessed, but it also raised a lot of little question marks for the Classics still ahead. Even though some top riders were missing, like Mathieu van der Poel and Mads Pedersen, it was still an interesting two days of racing at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne. And now it’s going to be exciting to see how it all develops.
In keeping with the trend of recent years, these races are opening up earlier and earlier, with big attacks coming from distance. In the past, you could say Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne was more of a race for sprinters, but on Sunday, the winning move went clear with almost 90km to go. It’s crazy how early everything is going now, and in races and situations like these, I think you really need a strong team around you.
On that note, Visma-Lease A Bike were the dominant team. Like last year, they won both races, this time with Jan Tratnik and Wout van Aert. I think they proved that they have the strongest team and they showed that they’re going to have the strongest line-up at the Classics. They’ve constructed a great roster of riders for these races.
But even though they had another very successful weekend, they were not flawless. Visma-Lease A Bike are at the very top of the game when it comes to things like nutrition and training, they are leading the way in those departments. But tactics-wise and racing-wise, they’re not any different to the others.
At Omloop, they looked in a perfect position with three riders in a break of six and, somehow, they still almost lost the race when it all came back together over the Muur. We all thought the race was over at a certain point, but then it nearly ended up as a bunch sprint.
In the finale, Tratnik was able to grab hold of the situation for Visma again and win the race, but I wasn’t certain about their strategy before that, when Van Aert was in the break with Matteo Jorgenson and Christophe Laporte.
It was understandable that they started attacking the other riders in the move – Arnaud De Lie, Tom Pidcock and Toms Skuijns – but I’m not sure if Jorgenson was the right rider to send up the road. He went, but he didn’t really go in a way that said, ‘Ok, I’m gone.’ It was more like he was riding as bait in front, maybe waiting for somebody to join him. I would have expected Laporte to be the rider to attack before the Muur, because Jorgenson didn’t look as smooth as him.
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