After three weeks of lonesome labour on the volcano, Wout van Aert heads straight into the crucible of the cobbled Classics when he lines up at the E3 Saxo Classic on Friday. For the past 22 days, the Belgian was sparring with shadows up and down Mount Teide. On Friday, he will trade blows with Mathieu van der Poel in the heart of the Flemish Ardennes.
For generations, received wisdom decreed that this kind of abrupt transition from training camp to racing was simply too risky to be worthwhile, but that thinking has been turned on its head in recent years. Just this month, after all, Tadej Pogacar delivered an 81km solo to win on his first race day at Strade Bianche, while Van der Poel began his season with the Oscar for best supporting actor at Milan-San Remo.
Van Aert has already racked up nine race days this season, of course, winning Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne and placing third at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, but his decision to sit out Strade Bianche, Tirreno-Adriatico and Milan-San Remo marked a significant departure from his typical build-up to the key weekends of his Spring.
After a series of frustrations at the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix over the years, Van Aert clearly reckoned that a change was in order. Yet while his decision to pare back his cyclocross commitments over the winter was imminently logical, his near month-long hiatus before E3 Harelbeke stoked curiosity, not least because it’s been done before, and not with any notable success.
In 2013, buoyed by their annexation of the Tour de France the previous summer, Team Sky sought to apply some of coach Tim Kerrison’s unconventional thinking to the Spring Classics. A core group that included Geraint Thomas, Ian Stannard and Bernhard Eisel took the then almost taboo step of riding neither Paris-Nice nor Tirreno-Adriatico before the Classics. Instead, they spent a little over a fortnight cloistered in the Parador hotel atop Mount Teide for a training camp.
Sky’s Classics unit had already raced early and often that season, lining out at the Tour Down Under, the Tour of Qatar, Opening Weekend and Le Samyn, but their hiatus was met with a degree of scepticism among their peers. There was also considerable intrigue, mind, given Sky’s stage racing dominance in that era.
“It never seemed that wacky to us, but it was definitely against the grain and the traditional way of doing things,” Thomas told Cyclingnews and Het Nieuwsblad recently. “These days people are training a lot more and…
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