Even though I was at the UAE Tour with Tudor Pro Cycling Team last week, I was still able to find a way to watch Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne. Funnily enough, I actually didn’t ride Opening Weekend very much in my career – only twice, in fact – because I preferred to get in another full week of training before Strade Bianche and the Italian races, but I still knew all about the old belief that the rider who wins Omloop can’t win the Tour of Flanders.
I don’t know if that’s really the case anymore, because a lot has changed in terms of training and conditioning in recent years, and the ‘new’ route of Omloop, with the Muur and Bosberg, makes it even more like the Tour of Flanders. In any case, at Omloop and again at Kuurne, Jumbo-Visma were the dominant team, winning with Dylan van Baarle on Saturday and then with Tiesj Benoot the following day.
I was pleased for Tiesj, because that was his first ever win in Belgium, which is remarkable when you think of how good he is, and on both days, Jumbo-Visma raced a really smart race. Winning bike races today isn’t just about having good legs. Sure, they had strength in numbers, but the key thing was that they used that advantage well, and in slightly different ways in each race.
At Omloop, they were really controlling the bunch and then Van Baarle was dominant in the finale. At Kuurne, they went into attack mode and they went early, putting Tiesj and Nathan Van Hooydonck in the break. They came straight from a training camp to these races, which is a different approach to when I was racing, but maybe I would do the same if I was still a rider now, because things have moved on and evolved a lot in the last few years.
Either way, they clearly showed that they were ready. Their condition already had to be really good to do what they did, and so that brings up that traditional Opening Weekend question – how long can they hold that condition? Only time will tell.
The other question, of course, is how does everybody else try to beat Jumbo-Visma? The first thing to say is that not everybody was racing at Opening Weekend, including Jumbo’s most important rider, Wout van Aert. We’ll also have to wait and see what happens when Mathieu van der Poel, Tadej Pogačar and Julian Alaphilippe are all in the same race too, that would change things, and it’s worth remembering that Stefan Küng had the flu before Opening Weekend too.
But even at the weekend, things could have played out differently, as Matej Mohorič pointed out in his interview after Omloop, when he explained that Bahrain Victorious made a mistake and had Jonathan Milan in the move with Van Baarle instead of him. I liked Mohorič’s interview, because he immediately saw how they could have raced differently and he pointed out that, although Jumbo were dominant at the weekend, they are still beatable. Still, it’s always hard to race against a team with a lot of options like Jumbo, it means you really can’t afford to make any mistakes.
Van Aert
Van Aert isn’t riding Strade Bianche on Saturday either, but for the rest of the Spring, he will be in the Jumbo-Visma team and that might change how they ride, too. It’s going to be very interesting when Jumbo have their top line-up together at the start, because that creates the luxury problem of who they’re going to ride for. Right now, they’re winning and that’s fun and nice. But they have another rider to come in who might take away some freedom of movement from Van Baarle and Tiesj, two riders who are themselves potential winners of Flanders.
Maybe they’ll go to the Tour of Flanders with just one leader, because Wout has been close before and it’s the race he really wants to win. Perhaps they’ll play the team card again, with multiple options. But either way, Wout will still want to win it and not come second or third, so even if there are team orders and even if there’s a lot of respect between all the riders, guys like Van Baarle and Tiesj might find themselves having to take a step back. It’s going to be challenging, but it’s also a nice, luxury problem for Jumbo to have.
In any case, Wout will have been given plenty to think about after watching Opening Weekend. He will have had fun seeing how strong his team is, for sure, but it’s maybe given him some healthy concern as well. He might feel like he needs to pull the trigger quite hard now in training to be in top shape, because it’s clear that the other guys are not sleeping. Nobody is.
Arnaud De Lie was impressive on Saturday and it’s nice to see a young rider performing at that level. Of course, in Belgium, as soon as you're winning bike races – boom – you're straightaway in the spotlight, and then it's hard to deal with the pressure. So it’s important to be patient, too, and give him time to develop.
But all across the peloton so far this season, and not just at Opening Weekend, we’ve seen new, young riders emerging. Even in the UAE Tour, the names up there in the bunch sprints weren’t necessarily the usual riders you would expect. I think it's evolving in the right direction to see exciting bike races in the coming weeks.
