Visma-Lease A Bike came into the 2024 Opening Weekend, having dominated the pair of Belgian season openers last spring before going on to do the same for much of the Spring Classics.
It was no surprise, then, that the Dutch squad repeated the trick at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday, once again finishing in Ninove with a rider bookending the podium spots.
What may have come as something of a shock, however, is that, on a team featuring cobbled Classics stars Wout van Aert, Dylan van Baarle, and Christophe Laporte, it was Slovenian veteran Jan Tratnik who ended the day with the triumph in Ninove.
34-year-old Tratnik does have previous results in the spring, having finished 12th at the 2022 Tour of Flanders in addition to a top-10 placing at Dwars door Vlaanderen three days earlier. He didn’t enter the second Omloop of his career among the top favourites, though being a key member of the strongest team in the peloton surely helped.
“Maybe I didn’t believe enough in the morning or before that I can win this because I know I got chances last week in Algarve and in Spain,” Tratnik said in the post-race press conference. “But I also know that here we have such a strong Classics team. But in the end, I believed in the last kilometre that I could win, so it was good.”
Tratnik went clear just over 8km outside Ninove, taking Nils Politt along with him after the pair had been among a reduced chase group to make contact with the front of the race on the day’s final climb of the Bosberg.
His Visma-Lease A Bike teammates – Van Aert, Laporte, Tiesj Benoot and Matteo Jorgenson – had been out front in an ever-reducing group since the 130km to go mark after splitting the peloton to pieces in the high winds that struck the race.
Tratnik said he was right at the front when the split happened but missed out through a small mistake taking a corner.
“When we started the echelons, I started with Wout and Affini, but then in one corner, I did one mistake because I broke too much and I lost 10 positions,” he said.
“Then the team put it in the wind again, and I think I was one of the last who dropped. But in the end, we had five guys at the front and me and Dylan behind, so for us, it was just about staying behind, controlling attacks and then trying to race if it comes together.”
He said he didn’t believe things would come back together, with the lead group enjoying over a minute’s lead with 30km to go. The group, however, had been whittled down to just six by that point before…
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