Opening Weekend annually kicks off the traditional Spring Classics campaign with a bang at the men’s and women’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad held on Saturday, followed by Sunday’s Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne for men and the women’s Omloop van het Hageland during the last weekend in February.
The collection of races is also widely known as the gateway to the Belgian cycling season because it raises the curtain on one-day events that range from 1.1, Pro Series and WorldTour.
As part of the modern top-tier calendar of professional bike racing, the peloton will have already competed across warmer climates at Australia’s Tour Down Under and Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, in the Middle East at the UAE Tour, along with lower categorized races across southern Europe for the Mallorca Challenge, Volta ao Algarve and Ruta del Sol, and in South America at the Tour Colombia.
Opening Weekend thus marks the peloton’s first foray into the oftentimes cold, wet, and windy late-winter weather for which Belgium is so well known and offers a taste of what’s to come in the bigger one-day races over the following two months.
It is also during Opening Weekend that riders and teams test out the lay of the land and a chance to gauge each other’s form, team cohesion, and new equipment across Belgium’s famous cobbled terrain.
Overall, the traditional Opening Weekend in Belgium is what will set the tone for the upcoming major Spring Classics and give us all a glimpse into what we can expect at the WorldTour races to follow in Belgium, at races like the Classic Brugge-De Panne, E3 Saxo Classic, Gent-Wevelgem, Dwars door Vlaanderen and the Tour of Flanders. It’s also a good forecast for the Spring Classics held in other nations such as Strade Bianche and Milan-San Remo in Italy and Paris-Roubaix in France.
Opening Weekend might not tell us everything we need to know, but it is the perfect place to start the narratives that will unfold during the rest of the one-day races held across March and April.
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