For years, the road to victory in the cobbled Classics ran through Patrick Lefevere’s teams. Even on the rare afternoons when they were beaten, they always extracted a heavy toll from their rivals. These days, however, it feels as though Soudal-QuickStep have been bypassed entirely on their home patch.
The scene at the bus parking beyond the finish line of E3 Saxo Classic on Friday afternoon told its own story. In victory or defeat, the QuickStep bus was traditionally the focus of the post-mortem at races like this, with reporters and camera crews bustling outside to hear Lefevere’s snap judgement on events in the Flemish Ardennes.
Nowadays, the media scrums form outside the Visma-Lease a Bike and Alpecin-Deceuninck buses. At the Soudal-QuickStep bus, by contrast, the team staff could go about their post-race duties in peace. The Mathieu van der Poel-Wout van Aert rivalry obliterates all other storylines this Spring, of course, but it’s still striking that lacklustre Soudal-QuickStep displays no longer feel novel enough to be truly newsworthy. This is simply the new normal.
Friday marked the worst E3 Saxo Classic performance of QuickStep’s history, superseding even last year’s apparent nadir of 16th. Yves Lampaert was the team’s best finisher on Friday, and he reached Harelbeke in 28th place, more than four minutes down on Van der Poel. The team that won this race eight times in its first 18 years of existence has somehow become an also-ran on the cobbles over the past three Springs.
QuickStep have faced crises in the Classics before. In 2010 and 2011, there was much gnashing of teeth over their struggle to resist Fabian Cancellara’s imperial phase. But even then, Tom Boonen and company were Cancellara’s doughtiest rival, and they duly returned to pre-eminence as the decade wore on. In 2024, by contrast, Soudal-QuickStep are struggling even to compete with the men chasing the unassailable Van der Poel and Van Aert.
“I don’t blame anyone for not being able to follow Mathieu van der Poel or Wout van Aert, who are hors catégorie, but we’re not even participating in the group behind them,” Lefevere wrote in his Het Nieuwsblad column on Saturday. “Lidl-Trek has clearly taken a step forward and is in the top ten with three riders. UAE Team Emirates has two men and neither of them is called Tadej Pogačar. We have no one.”
Soudal-QuickStep’s recruitment policy has contributed to their shortcomings in the Classics. In recent seasons,…
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