With Wout van Aert out of the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad due to illness, debutant Mathieu van der Poel stands alone at the top of the favourites list, with some distance between him and the next expected best. But, even without their talisman, Tadej Pogačar, could men’s cycling’s top team, UAE Team Emirates-XRG, actually be the biggest threat to the Dutchman’s chances of winning the first big Classic of the 2026 season?
It’s no secret that when racing reaches Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix – the first three of the five Monuments, cycling’s biggest one-day races – Pogačar and Van der Poel will be the two likely protagonists, having won 18 between them.
“We have a lot of guys who are missing, especially Johnny Narváez and Mikkel Bjerg, also, which hit us hard after the racing in Australia,” Politt told Cyclingnews while racing at the UAE Tour last week, after some bad luck in the early season hit their Classics core.
Wellens looks the most likely to actually be able to challenge Van der Poel, given his absolute dominance at the Clásica Jaén gravel/road race in Spain early this month, where he rode 54km solo, so he could well be able to withstand the moment the race is inevitably blown apart by the Dutchman.
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…