When Flandriens Attack! Part 1: The Old Course

These days I think what I do best is recall past editions of the Tour of Flanders. Well, and my puttanesca is pretty nailed down too. But that won’t help us this week, not at least without knowing who may be putting their Ronde dreams in jeopardy by eating bad pasta. So assuming the team chefs are on their game, then let us turn to the past… to YouTube… to lessons learned from…

WHEN FLANDRIENS ATTACK!!

Naw, man, that’s When Animals Attack!, a super dumb American TV show from the 14th century. I’m talking about cycling!

Photo by Photo12/UIG/Getty Images

Huh. Bike racing in Russia 100 years ago was LIT.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to dredge up some old lessons about famous attacks at the Ronde van Vlaanderen as a way to think about this Sunday’s race. Let’s look at a few from the old course today, and a few more from the new course tomorrow.

The Lieutenant Attack

There was a fair bit of chatter this week after Jumbo’s Wout Van Aert, Belgium’s top classics star, allowed his French teammate Christophe Laporte to take the win from a two-teammate breakaway at Gent-Wevelgem. Recriminations came from the usual old heads who couldn’t imagine such a chivalrous gesture — if anyone even tried asking Roger De Vlaeminck what he thought, I hope they did so from a safe distance. But even Tom Boonen, one of the nicer megastars of recent cycling vintage, was a bit disapproving of the move, saying Wout may regret it. Maybe Tom was thinking of this:

Photo by Tim De Waele/Getty Images

Tom has regrets. He regrets letting Stijn Devolder off the leash as a supposed decoy, not once, but twice, and now Devolder, a perfectly cromulent classics talent, is a Double-Flanders Winner.

No disrespect intended though. Devolder was an absolute beast in the 2008 race and nearly as stolid in 2009 when he stole away on the Muur from a small group of C-list escapees. Fine, whatever, but let’s focus on that first one. Boonen entered the ‘08 Ronde as a god-like figure who was sure to have half the peloton on his wheel… and revenge on his mind after Alessandro Ballan’s shock win the previous spring. His Quick Step team seemed reasonably strong but more “Tom…