If you want to do well in Strade Bianche and your name isn’t Tadej Pogačar, then it’s definitely a good idea to have done a few one-day races beforehand, and if one of them at least is Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, there are several advantages. That’s because Strade and Omloop are both very nervous races, and that extra high tension is something you can practice handling in one race and then put that practice into effect in another.
OK, the terrain is completely different and there’s not so much climbing in Omloop. But every time you have an approach to a sector and there’s a fight to be in the front, the efforts are exactly the same in both races.
Equipment is a very different story. I’d imagine the bikes many teams are using in Strade are the same ones that they have already used in the Clásica Jaén. Maybe the surface isn’t 100% the same in both races, but the feeling on most of the sectors will be, as well as the amount of climbing, and it’s quite different to do a flat gravel/off-road race than one that’s constantly uphill and downhill.
Equally, given Omloop is a much more important race than Jáen, they’ll have tried out tyres or wheel setups there in Spain rather than in Belgium. The feedback from there will be very important for Strade, although again, they’ll test the pressures there again in Italy. That’s because I don’t know if there’s much difference in the kind of gravel they have in Jaén and in Strade, but that also affects the tyre pressure a lot.
Handling Tadej (or not)
Then there’s the race itself and how you adapt to having a big favourite like Tadej Pogačar, which is very similar to Omloop and how it was for the opposition with Mathieu van der Poel.
It’s a difficult one, because not many riders, if any, can follow Tadej if he attacks, so you cannot really put your focus on him. Imagine if you’d been in Omloop and said ‘Right, when I’m on the Muur I’ll follow Mathieu, and then I’ll get in the top three at…
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