Soudal-QuickStep are drinking in the last chance saloon of the 2023 cobbled Classics this Sunday, with the Belgian team bidding for their seventh Paris-Roubaix title and first major Classic of the season.
The ‘big two’ of Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert are the top favourites to haul the cobblestone trophy above their head in the Roubaix velodrome. However, Patrick Lefevere’s team are perennial contenders at the race, and with the likes of Kasper Asgreen and Yves Lampaert heading up the squad, few are prepared to totally count them out.
A cobbled Classics season without a big win isn’t totally alien to QuickStep – they blanked in 2010 and 2013 – and in the final big race on the pavé, Lefevere has revised his ambitions downward.
“A podium, eh?” Lefevere told Cyclingnews about his hopes for his team at the start of the Paris-Roubaix Femmes avec Zwift in Denain on Saturday.
“If not, then the world will go on,” he added philosophically. “Then we go to the Walloon Classics the week after and we try something else at Amstel, Flèche and Liège. We’ll see.”
But the spring so far hasn’t all been about the Classics, of course, even if the cobbles are Soudal-QuickStep’s bread and butter, their ‘home ground’.
The team has racked up 18 wins so far in 2023, including Remco Evenepoel’s UAE Tour victory, Julian Alaphilippe’s Faun-Ardèche Classic win, and Fabio Jakobsen’s stage at Tirreno-Adriatico. Lefevere keeps a close eye on his team’s progress and has all the statistics to hand.
“On the other hand I look to yesterday because when we look at Itzulia Basque Country we have our 19th second place and I know nobody that did better.
“I also count the Tour du Rwanda,” he laughed, noting that Ethan Vernon’s stage wins with QuickStep’s development team should count towards the win total.
Lefevere said that morale among the team had ebbed at times during the past month, with Tim Merlier’s Nokere Koerse win and Lampaert’s podium at the Classic Brugge-De Panne the highlights of a troubled Classics season so far.
He noted, though, that illness and injury has affected the team over the past month and mooted the idea of a ‘bubble’ style group for future spring campaigns.
“After Gent-Wevelgem the morale was not that good,” Lefevere said. “They were a little bit like beaten dogs like I said to them, but I think we cannot sing every year the same song. We have a lot of people injured, sick.
“I said that maybe next year we have to change something. I prefer that everybody stays…
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