Arnaud De Lie had to settle for 10th place at the end of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, but the Lotto-Dstny rider will draw encouragement for the remainder of the Spring from his display against the collective might of Visma-Lease A Bike.
Although Jan Tratnik ultimately claimed victory in Meerbeke, the race didn’t run entirely according to Visma-Lease A Bike’s plan, and De Lie reckoned that he and Toms Skuijsn (Lidl-Trek) had been the strongest in the key six-man move that formed inside the final 50km.
As expected, Wout van Aert’s squad seized control of the race early, splitting the peloton with 130km still to race. De Lie was wise to the danger there, and he was later part of the seemingly decisive six-man move that went clear over the Wolvenberg.
De Lie joined Skuijns and Tom Pidcock (Ineos) in the break, but he also had three Visma-Lease A Bike riders for company – Van Aert, Matteo Jorgenson and European champion Christophe Laporte.
That trio looked to outmanoeuvre their breakaway companions by attacking in turn on the run-in and they sent Jorgenson up the road with 21km remaining, but Van Aert’s anticipated move on the Muur van Geraardsbergen never materialised.
Instead, the race came back together over the final climb of the Bosberg, with eventual winner Jan Tratnik (Visma-Lease A Bike) and Nils Politt (UAE Team Emirates) slipping away with 9km to go. Van Aert won the mass sprint for the final podium spot, while De Lie rolled home in 10th.
“I felt really good,” De Lie told RTBF afterwards. “We were with three Visma riders, but I think they were afraid of us too. If you have three riders and you know you can win, you don’t attack, you just ride. In the end, it was Tratnik who won, but they played poker.
“Frankly, Skuijns and I were maybe the two strongest riders, but playing against three of them was difficult all the same. We can’t all be Ian Stannard, who was able to do that a decade ago [in 2015 against QuickStep – ed.] But I’m very happy with my form. Everybody thought I was going badly but today I showed that I was going well.”
De Lie placed second at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad a year ago and he has clear ambitions for this Spring, but he had been relatively subdued in his three one-day outings thus far in 2024.
He didn’t miss a beat on the first day of the Belgian season, however, making the early split, joining the break with Van Aert et al and then leading the favourites up the Muur. He confessed afterwards that he may have been too generous in his pace-making efforts in the early split.
“I was with Jasper De Buyst and we rode a bit, but I think we were too kind, we shouldn’t have ridden,” De Lie said of their collaboration with Visma, Lidl-Trek and Ineos.
“They’ve got three times our budget, it’s up to them to ride. We’ll know that for the next time. We’ll need to play poker a bit more sometimes.”
De Lie added that Van Aert was keen on greater collaboration from his breakaway companions in the finale despite Visma’s numerical advantage.
“It was complicated to play it tactically against that group,” he said. “Wout van Aert told me to ride but that makes me laugh. I’m there with three Vismas, I’m going to ride and then get suckered… In the end, we were caught anyway.
"You have to play it well, but I saw that I was the strongest on the climbs in the last 30km, so that’s reassuring for what’s to come, for Le Samyn and above all for Paris-Nice, where there are some nice stages for me.”
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