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In public, Patrick Lefevere usually leans on his training as a frugal bookkeeper whenever his teams struggle at this time of the year. The final balance sheet for the Classics, he always points out, is only ever tallied after Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and that old maxim rang true last season when Remco Evenepoel bailed everybody out at La Doyenne.
On the privacy of the Soudal-QuickStep bus, however, Lefevere surely has a rather more urgent message for his riders this year, who are floundering for the second cobbled Classics campaign in succession.
With favourites Wout van Aert, Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel seemingly out of reach and on another planet at the Tour of Flanders, Wednesday’s Dwars door Vlaanderen suddenly takes on outsized importance for a team whose fall has been as precipitous as it is perplexing.
A relative lack of recruitment for the Classics department in recent seasons may not have helped, but the very same riders who dictated the terms of engagement on the Flemish Ardennes just two years ago are now apparent also-rans, stumbling from one subdued performance in the Classics to the next.
Tim Merlier’s Nokere Koerse victory is their lone win on Belgian roads this year, and a glance at the position of Soudal-QuickStep’s highest finishers across the Classics calendar makes for sobering reading: 6th at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, 9th at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, 30th at Strade Bianche, 11th at Milan-San Remo, 3rd at Brugge-De Panne, 16th at the E3 Saxo Classic and 14th at Gent-Wevelgem.
In the past, the occasional mis-step in these races could quickly be written off as an aberration. In 2023, Lefevere’s charges have no such luxury.
Another fall, Albert Camus’ La Chute, comes to mind: “Don’t wait for the last judgement. It’s taking place every day.”
The irony is that the man who has been judged most harshly by Lefevere in recent months is also the rider most likely to shake his team from its torpor.
Julian Alaphilippe’s 2022 season was plagued by crashes and illness, but that didn’t spare him from some rather tough love from Lefevere over the winter. “He can’t keep hiding behind that,” his patron sniffed.
Still, Alaphilippe’s absence from the cobbled Classics was keenly felt last year, and the decision to send him back to Flanders this Spring was made in the belief that he was one of the very few riders on the planet capable of competing at the same exalted levels as Van Aert, Van der Poel and Pogačar….
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