A year after she took an utterly unexpected victory at Nieuwsblad, Lotte Claes has confirmed she won't be taking part in this year's Opening Weekend Classic, and instead she will be watching it on TV with decidedly mixed feelings about her non-participation.
The Fenix-Premier Tech racer told Nieuwsblad on Tuesday that she will instead be focussing on the Ardennes Classics, events that are much more suitable for the 32-year-old's characteristics as a racer.
Claes said she will definitely be watching the 2026 race, but from three different locations – her home, her car and at the airport – as she's heading to Spain for a training camp the same day.
Rather than Omloop, then, Claes will next be taking part in the Trofeo Alfredo Binda on March 15, followed by the Ardennes Classics in April and the Vuelta España Femenina in May.
Reflecting on that shock win
It was clear from her interview with Nieuwsblad that winning the Omloop will retain a very special moment in her career.
Her landmark victory in the 2025 edition came after the top teams shot themselves in the foot by refusing to chase the four-rider early break, which included Claes.
The upshot was that after two of the four were dropped and an agonisingly long sprint against the almost equally unknown Polish rider Aurela Nerlo, Claes took the win. For now, it remains the only victory of her career, but a hugely impressive one nonetheless.
"Physically, I was on the verge of collapse, but mentally I wouldn't give in and I had to get back on that rear wheel," Claes said after Nerlo launched a very long sprint with almost a kilometre to go.
"I've never felt my lungs and heart as much as I did in that sprint. I pulled everything I had left in my body out."
The odds on her being up for the win in Nieuwsblad were already extremely long even before she had started. Claes said she had only been told two minutes before the start by her then team, the now-defunct Arkéa-B&B, that she could go in breakaways, rather than their original idea that she play a support role for her sprinters.
Then, as the chase of the break of the day failed to materialize, it was game on for the four riders ahead, culminating in one of the most improbable - but well-deserved, given Claes' determination to get in the early move and go with it all the way to the finish - wins of the season.
"Something like this happens every few years in the women's peloton," Claes told Nieuwsblad.
"On the Berendries, it dawned on me. I kept a fast pace, and the other girls were calling for a slower pace. That's where I responded for the first time that we had to keep going because one of us was bound to win. At the finish, we still had more than three minutes left."
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