Opening Weekend provided confirmation of some things that we might already have guessed, but it also raised a lot of little question marks for the Classics still ahead. Even though some top riders were missing, like Mathieu van der Poel and Mads Pedersen, it was still an interesting two days of racing at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne. And now it’s going to be exciting to see how it all develops.
In keeping with the trend of recent years, these races are opening up earlier and earlier, with big attacks coming from distance. In the past, you could say Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne was more of a race for sprinters, but on Sunday, the winning move went clear with almost 90km to go. It’s crazy how early everything is going now, and in races and situations like these, I think you really need a strong team around you.
On that note, Visma-Lease A Bike were the dominant team. Like last year, they won both races, this time with Jan Tratnik and Wout van Aert. I think they proved that they have the strongest team and they showed that they’re going to have the strongest line-up at the Classics. They’ve constructed a great roster of riders for these races.
But even though they had another very successful weekend, they were not flawless. Visma-Lease A Bike are at the very top of the game when it comes to things like nutrition and training, they are leading the way in those departments. But tactics-wise and racing-wise, they're not any different to the others.
At Omloop, they looked in a perfect position with three riders in a break of six and, somehow, they still almost lost the race when it all came back together over the Muur. We all thought the race was over at a certain point, but then it nearly ended up as a bunch sprint.
In the finale, Tratnik was able to grab hold of the situation for Visma again and win the race, but I wasn’t certain about their strategy before that, when Van Aert was in the break with Matteo Jorgenson and Christophe Laporte.
It was understandable that they started attacking the other riders in the move – Arnaud De Lie, Tom Pidcock and Toms Skuijns – but I’m not sure if Jorgenson was the right rider to send up the road. He went, but he didn’t really go in a way that said, ‘Ok, I’m gone.’ It was more like he was riding as bait in front, maybe waiting for somebody to join him. I would have expected Laporte to be the rider to attack before the Muur, because Jorgenson didn’t look as smooth as him.
Visma-Lease A Bike showed their collective strength this weekend, but they can also destroy themselves. They really need to race together as a team, they need to collaborate.
They’ve got a lot of top riders on the team who have already won Classics before, in other words, like Dylan van Baarle, Tiesj Benoot, Laporte and Van Aert. Now we can add Tratnik to that list, so let’s see if he has ambitions to go for the next races himself or if he is happy just to ride for others. That’s a question going forward – how will they divide the races between them and how will they decide the tactics?
The other interesting question is Van Aert’s schedule for the next few weeks. Usually, Tirreno or Paris-Nice is the place to go in March to develop the legs and see the condition evolve, but Wout is going to train at altitude instead. He won’t race again until E3 Harelbeke, and he’s missing Strade Bianche and Milan-San Remo too. I don’t know if this correct or not, but it’s certainly a different and new preparation.
One thing I can guess is that he’ll be going very deep in training. I didn’t race Opening Weekend very much in my career, I usually preferred to skip it, like Van der Poel and Pedersen have done this year. When Omloop and Kuurne were taking place, I would be at home training, and I knew I had to go deep those days, because my rivals were going deep in those races.
That was my motivation to go out for six or seven hours, either motor pacing or on the climbs in my region. I effectively raced my own race in training, maybe inflicting more pain on myself that I would have done in the race. In a way, it was a bit of mental training too.
Tudor gaining experience and making an impression
This year, I was in Belgium for Opening Weekend, of course, because Tudor Pro Cycling Team was racing Omloop and Kuurne for the first time. I was very proud for our organisation to be there, but this is just the beginning of the journey that we’re on. We didn’t look for invitations in 2023 for structural reasons and because we’re looking to grow gradually, but we’ll be racing a lot on the cobbles this year.
We came away with top 10 finishes in each of the races – Matteo Trentin was 9th at Omloop and Marius Mayrhofer was 9th in Kuurne – and we also came away with a lot of lessons learned about competing in Belgium on the cobbles, which is very important for a team with so many young guys.
These aren’t just regular bike races, there are so many details you need to learn about positioning, the parcours, the wind direction and so on, so this was a really big experience for them. The early split at Omloop was a big lesson about cycling at the highest level. And when the race came back together, it was another lesson – the race is never over until the finish line.
On Sunday, maybe some of the guys paid a bit for the fatigue of Omloop, and we weren’t in the front group. Maybe the fatigue was more than they expected, but that was also a good experience. I was there to support the boys with my own experience – not of winning, but just of all the basic stuff about racing in Belgium.
The key thing now is that they digest the experience of Opening Weekend in a positive way and build on it, so they’ll be ready for the next races. We’ll be at Strade Bianche next weekend and then Tirreno-Adriatico, and we’ll also be back in Belgium for E3 Harelbeke, and those are bigger and harder races.
Matteo isn’t yet on the level where he wants to be, but we’re working on that, and the team also performed well at the UAE Tour, so we’re looking forward to what’s coming. We’ve already got over 1,000 UCI points, much more than last year, but while the ranking is important, we’re thinking about much more than results and want to race with a unified, daring approach.
It’s also nice that people are taking note of what we’re doing, including Wout van Aert. He isn’t going to leave Visma any time soon, of course, but last week, Het Nieuwsblad asked him where he would sign if he ever had to make a change. Wout named Tudor and Uno-X, pointing to our structure and our focus on developing riders. I take that as a compliment. It shows that we work properly, and that we have a plan and a vision.
