Five ways to win Omloop Het Nieuwsblad – From the familiar formulas to ways to outwit the competition

It's nearly here, one of the most anticipated points on the racing calendar: Opening Weekend. Kicking off with the WorldTour Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday and then the lower-level Omloop van het Hageland and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne on Sunday, this weekend marks the start of the major Classics season, and the first big cobbled tests of the spring.

As much as Omloop Het Nieuwsblad is very clearly the opener, and an early test in some ways, it is also a major Classic, and a race many, many riders want to win. There are still weeks to go until the Tour of Flanders, but Omloop isn't solely a precursor; it's a big event in itself.

It's also a race that is notoriously hard to predict, given the lack of Classics racing that precedes it, leaving us with little to no insight into the dynamics, hierarchies and narratives that form every spring. We have a sense of some riders' physical form from early-season racing, but not all riders have started yet and even then, Classics racing is a lot more complicated than just feeling strong on the day.

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With Omloop now just a few days away, Cyclingnews has been looking back at previous editions of the men's and women's races to pick out some of the many ways riders can win this race.

Which climb should they attack on? Can it be won in a sprint? How can someone surprise the peloton and do something totally different?

In reality, there are probably 100 different ways to win Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, some we've seen and some we haven't, but as we wait to see who will take the first Classics crowns of 2026 this Saturday, here are five tried-and-tested formulas for how it can be done.

A bunch sprint

This article isn't meant to be a ranking of ways to win Omloop, but I am putting this first because it would be bottom of my list if I were doing that. Bunch sprints in cobbled Classics are boring, I'll say it. These races are meant to be battles, be it attritional or tactical, where only the strongest survive, and a bunch sprint is not that.

That said, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad can be and has been won in a bunch sprint. The men's race concluded this way in 2025, with Søren Wærenskjold taking the win, and 2021 ended that way too, when it was taken by Davide Ballerini. For this to happen, there have to be enough teams with an interest in a sprint to close down moves and keep the pace high to the finish, or maybe a lack of riders interested in attacking.

That's relatively uncommon in the first big Classic of the year, so bunch sprints are unusual, and that's no bad thing. This year, though, there are a lot of big-name sprinters on the start list for the men's race, so could it be that it ends in a sprint two years in a row?

All-day breakaway

The early break holding on to take the win is a rare but much-loved treat in cycling. It's usually an underdog victory, the story of persistence by a small group against a charging bunch, so it's not hard to see why fans like it. The fact it so rarely happens, particularly in the Classics, made it even more special when Lotte Claes achieved exactly that in last year's Omloop Het Nieuwsblad.

Claes got into a breakaway of five riders that went away in the first 10 kilometres of the race, and would usually be expected to be reeled in before the real action started. But they never were. Riders slowly dropped out of the break, but Claes and Aurela Nerlo arrived in Ninove nearly three minutes ahead of the bunch, and sprinted each other for the win, with the Belgian rider taking the spoils as the teams in the peloton blamed each other for not catching the duo. It was highly unusual and all but unrepeatable, but it is a way to win, as Claes proved.

How do you execute this feat? Well, that is a lot harder to say, as catching the breakaway is a mixture of factors – the break have to be strong, yes, but victory usually also relies on some kind of weakness, hesitation or mistake from the bunch. So of course you need to find yourself in a strong, committed and cooperative break, around six riders seems the ideal number, but you also need to count on some luck, and hope the peloton get it wrong somehow. Maybe they underestimate the break, or maybe they just race against each other too much. The break needs to be ready to exploit this, and seize their chance for that rare and surprising win.

Attack on the Muur

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad is not the hilliest race on the Classics calendar, but its finale is littered with climbs, so many that it's hard to identify the best one to attack on. The most iconic climb on the route is probably the Muur van Geraardsbergen, which comes around 20km from the finish line and is usually the penultimate ascent, with the Bosberg being the final one.

Its length and difficulty – 1.1km at 7.5% – has made the Muur a popular and often fruitful place to attack. Jasper Stuyven, Lotte Kopecky and Chantal van den Broek-Blaak all won after being aggressors on the Muur, and plenty of winning groups have been formed there, too. Even when the race isn't won here, it is often shaped definitively on the steep slopes up to the chapel.

This year, there are going to be even more climbs to choose from, with the Parikeberg and Tenbosse added just before the Muur. Could these encourage attackers to try to force the winning move even earlier, before the Muur? With the ever-increasing level of strength in both pelotons, it certainly seems possible.

Wait until the Bosberg

With so many climbs in the second half of Omloop, there definitely is a temptation to just wait until the last one, the Bosberg. It's pretty much 13km downhill from the top of the Bosberg to the finish line in Ninove, so you really can just send it from the top of the hill and go all-out to the line.

This is how Wout van Aert won Omloop in 2022, launching a move at the base of the climb, never to be seen again, and countless times we have seen the winning rider or small group go away definitively on this climb. It's not a particularly long climb, coming in at only 600 metres, but it's steep, cobbled and truly challenging.

The only drawback of waiting until the Bosberg is just that – you have to wait, show some patience, and try to conserve enough energy to launch a move there. By the time the race reaches this final climb, there will have been plenty of attacks, and every rider in the surviving group will have had to follow them, so it can be tricky to still have enough in the tank to go full gas up the climb, too.

However, when a strong rider manages that, an all-out effort on the Bosberg can be a thing of beauty, and a thrilling way for the race to be decided.

Mammoth solo effort

When it comes to winning Omloop alone, long-distance solo efforts are vanishingly rare. A solo of 20km is considered long in this race, and most winning attacks come much closer to the finish line.

There is one big solo ride in recent memory, though, and it came from a Classics legend in 2008. On the way to winning his second Omloop title – still called Omloop Het Volk back then – Philippe Gilbert went on a solo effort 49km from the finish line, and won by 58 seconds. A six-rider breakaway had got away earlier in the day, and when their gap ticked over six minutes, Gilbert wasn't prepared to let the break win, and he took matters into his own hands.

The Belgian attacked on the Eikenberg, taking no one with him, and gradually caught and passed the remaining leaders. Technically, he did have company on occasions so was only fully solo for the final 20km, but given his efforts to catch and pass the breakaway were on his own – and any move longer is practically unheard of in this race – we're going to count it as a big solo effort.

In the modern era where long-range attacks are now almost common, would we see a big solo move decide Omloop Het Nieuwsblad this weekend?

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